Using distributional data to explore derivational under-markedness: a study of the event/property polysemy in nominalization

This paper proposes a corpus-based analysis of deverbal suffixed nouns in Italian displaying an ambiguity between a clear event reading (partenza ‘departure’) and a clear property reading (intelligenza ‘intelligence’). It focuses, in particular on words derived with the suffixes -nza and -zione. Three sets of syntactic contexts for words containing the two suffixes (highand low-frequency -nza words and high-frequency -zione words) were extracted from a large corpus of contemporary Italian and coded according to their semantic reading. The comparison of the three datasets, on the one side, confirms an evolution, already observed in the literature, of -nza from a typically deverbal action suffix to a typically deadjectival property suffix, and, on the other side, shows that the same ambiguity is observed with -zione nouns, although, unlike the case of -nza, in this case it remains a marginal feature. The results obtained show the interest of large-scale empirical observations for the analysis of morphological phenomena, and militate in favour of a model in which (regular) polysemy should be considered as a constituting property of derived words.