Deverbal nominalizations without overt suffixation in French

Petra Sleeman

doi:10.21747/16466195/lingespa21

Abstract

Recent work on argument taking deverbal zero nouns in English has shown that they are more present in that language than was previously thought. In this paper the presence and productivity of argument taking zero-derived nouns in French is investigated. It is shown that to determine which nouns can count as zero nouns, several decisions have to be made. This concerns their gender (do both masculine and feminine nouns have to be included in the research?), the determination of what counts as an argument, the criteria used to determine if a noun is an argument taking noun, the form and category that the base may have. On the basis of the adopted criteria and a dictionary and database research, a corpus of French zero-derived nouns in French is composed and analyzed. The results show that, as in English, zero-derived nouns in French are more productive than was thought.

Highlights

Whereas Lees (1960) derived all types of nominalizations in the syntactic component of grammar, in Chomsky’s Remarks on Nominalizations (1970) a distinction was made between gerunds like destroying and derived nominals like destruction
In the Old French period, there were several other mechanisms to derive deverbal nouns than zeroderived deverbal nouns, namely nominalized infinitives and nouns derived by means of an overt suffix
The formation of nominalized infinitives became unproductive after the Old French period (Rochette 1988; Buridant 2008; Sleeman 2010)

Summary

Introduction

Whereas Lees (1960) derived all types of nominalizations in the syntactic component of grammar, in Chomsky’s Remarks on Nominalizations (1970) a distinction was made between gerunds like destroying and derived nominals like destruction. Chomsky argued that gerunds could still be derived in syntax, but that the place for derived nominalizations was the lexicon. Revista de Estudos Linguísticos da Universidade do Porto - N.o Especial - 2021 - 473-498 the lexicon as a natural consequence of the fact that in that period, in order to increase its explanatory power, syntax was already drastically simplified with respect to earlier models, such as Chomsky (1965). This holds both for Phrase Structure rules and Transformation Grammar (TG) rules. The rules were complex, varied, unmotivated, often idiosyncratic in form and interpretation.”

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