Action Nominals Inside

It is commonly acknowledged that deverbal action nominals are semantically ambiguous: among the many interpretations they can express (event, state, manner, location, etc.), the semantic distinction between Event (E) and Result (R) readings has been particularly emphasized because of its challenging syntactic corollaries (cf. Grimshaw 1990). Although this ambiguity has been subject to massive study and lively debates in the last two decades, several research questions are still in need of satisfying explanatory analyses, concerning both the formation and interpretation of E/R nominals. The main aim of the present research is to provide a principled answer to one of these fundamental questions, which has been largely neglected in the literature on the topic: 1) Why does the E interpretation seem to be the default one, while the R reading is not always available (e.g. abandonment, administration)? Trying to answer this question, however, also implies addressing an even more crucial issue: 2) What does it mean for a derived nominal to be a Result? The label result, in fact, has been loosely employed in syntactically-oriented analyses to indicate absence of argument structure, resulting in a great semantic dishomogeneity of the R class. Based on a relevant set of Italian nominals and primarily focused on the R class (which has been given less coverage in the literature on nominalizations), this research pursues the hypothesis that the semantics of the base verb strongly influences the meaning of the derived nominal, determining not only the aspectual properties of the E noun but also the chance of having an associated R interpretation. Specifically, a careful analysis of several semantic classes of verbs and corresponding nominals reveals that the formation of R nominals is constrained by a set of semantic requirements associated with the (structural and conceptual) semantic properties of the base verbs (cf. question 1). Further, framed in a decompositional model of lexical semantics (Lieber 2004), the present research represents an attempt to identify the precise semantic contribution of the verbal bases as well as that of the suffixes, i.e. the heads of these complex forms, and to offer a formal representation of their structural meaning. Specifically, I suggest that a different lexical semantic characterization and a corresponding distinct formal representation should be assumed for suffixes involved in the formation of R nominals with respect to those ones forming E nominals (the mere transpositional ones). This study also tackles the ontological status of R nominals …