Abstract
We present the results of a large-scale corpus-based comparison of two German event nominalization patterns: deverbal nouns in -ung (e.g., die Evaluierung, ‘the evaluation’) and nominal infinitives (e.g., das Evaluieren, ‘the evaluating’). Among the many available event nominalization patterns for German, we selected these two because they are both highly productive and challenging from the semantic point of view. Both patterns are known to keep a tight relation with the event denoted by the base verb, but with different nuances. Our study targets a better understanding of the differences in their semantic import.The key notion of our comparison is that of semantic transparency, and we propose a usage-based characterization of the relationship between derived nominals and their bases. Using methods from distributional semantics, we bring to bear two concrete measures of transparency which highlight different nuances: the first one, cosine, detects nominalizations which are semantically similar to their bases; the second one, distributional inclusion, detects nominalizations which are used in a subset of the contexts of the base verb. We find that only the inclusion measure helps in characterizing the difference between the two types of nominalizations, in relation with the traditionally considered variable of relative frequency (Hay, 2001). Finally, the distributional analysis allows us to frame our comparison in the broader coordinates of the inflection vs. derivation cline.
Highlights
Nominalization is a word-formation process that is highly productive in many languages, and can refer to both the process and the result of “turning something into a noun” (Comrie & Thompson, 2007:334)
In this study we focus on two specific patterns of German event nominalizations which can be frequently formed from the same base: deverbal nouns in -ung (UNG) and nominal infinitives4 (NI)
Task and regression analysis We investigate the usefulness of the distributional measures to distinguish between NI and UNG by setting up a binary classification task: given a set of features that describe a pair of a base verb and a derived noun, we train a logistic regression model to predict whether the derived word is a nominal infinitive or an ung nominalization of the base verb
Summary
Nominalization is a word-formation process that is highly productive in many languages, and can refer to both the process and the result of “turning something into a noun” (Comrie & Thompson, 2007:334). We focus on event nominalizations, which denote the event itself (abandon-ment) or its result state/object (astonish-ment, contain-ment) – as opposed to, for example, participant nominalizations, which may denote the agent (smok-er) or the instrument (blend-er). The term nominalization, points to the transpositional process that takes place when a verb is used as a base for a noun, and conveys the idea that we are talking about a complex word, not a simple one. We introduce the word-formation processes that are the object of the study: nominal infinitives and derivatives formed with the -ung suffix. In this study we focus on two specific patterns of German event nominalizations which can be frequently formed from the same base: deverbal nouns in -ung (UNG) and nominal infinitives (NI). Armee besorgten die Absperrung der Schlucht ‘Pioneers of the 6th army carried out the cordoning off of the gorge’
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