Aspect indicators for deverbal nominals on different syntactic levels

Abstract

Recent literature on deverbal nominalisations has focused on the aspectual differences between nominal events expressed by the derivational morphology of the noun as well as the problems regarding their interpretation in natural language examples extracted from text corpora (Ehrich and Rapp 2000; Borer 2005; Spranger and Heid 2007; Alexiadou et al. 2009; Heinold 2010). It seems that the close syntactic environment of such event-NPs (like modifiers or embedding verbal constructions) are quite reliable as indicators for their aspectual properties. It is, however, uncertain in how far such contexts as well as the tense and aspect of the sentence interact with the aspectual information within the nominals themselves. This paper shortly introduces the lexical and morphological units in NPs and VPs which carry aspectual information. I present English, German and French data which show that in sentences where nominal and verbal event information interact different levels of aspect have to be kept apart in order to do justice to the subtle semantic differences of complex event situations.