The NOMAGE Project Annotating the semantic features of French nominalizations (project abstract)

From the work of (Lees, 1960), through (Chomsky, 1970) and (Grimshaw, 1990), to more recent studies, nominalizations have occupied a central place in grammatical analysis, with a focus on morphological and syntactic aspects. More recently, researchers have begun to address a specific issue often neglected before, i.e. the semantics of nominalizations, and its implications for Natural Language Processing applications such as electronic ontologies or Information Retrieval. We focus on precisely these issues in the research project NOMAGE (ANR-07-JCJC-0085-01), a young researchers’ project funded by the French National Research Agency (ANR). The present submission outlines this ongoing semantic annotation project. Several previous works on the semantics of deverbal nouns (Haas & Huyghe, to appear), (Haas, Huyghe, & Maŕın, 2008) and (Huyghe & Maŕın, 2007), indicate that nominals inherit certain aspectual properties from their associated verbs. This is particularly clear when comparing telic verb (accomplishment and achievement) vs. atelic verb (state and activity) nominal derivations. For example, telic verb nominal derivations may appear in an N position such as in (1a) and (1b) while this position is not available to stative verb nominal derivations.