Lexical aspect and number variation in French Complex Event Nominals

Abstract

In this work, we examine the factors allowing or disallowing French Complex Event Nominals (CENs, i.e. deverbal nominals displaying argument and aspectual structures, Grimshaw 1990) to occur in the plural when denoting a plurality of events. Our claim is that French CENs can occur in the plural in such cases (Meinschaefer 2005; Roodenburg 2006; Sleeman & Brito 2010), and thus behave as count nouns. However, a restricted subclass does not exhibit number variation, similarly to other non-count nouns.To account for the distribution of nominal plurality, we rely on lexical aspect. We show that the CENs that do not admit pluralization are strictly atelic: they nominalize strictly stative verbs or push-verbs (Verkuyl 1993). Conversely, CENs derived from any other aspectual verb class can appear in the plural, even when they nominalize atelic VPs, provided these also have a telic use. This leads to a restatement of the role of boundedness previously invoked to account for the relationship between verbal (a)telicity and nominal [±count] distinction (Bach 1976; Mourelatos 1978; Krifka 1989), that linked the [±count] property of the derived event nominal to the actual (a)telicity of the VP.Since the distribution of plural just described is proper to CENs, which have an internal verbal structure, we suggest that it deserves a syntactic analysis. Our hypothesis is that [–count] CENs derive from verbs that are deprived of AspQP (Borer 1993; 2005). This results in turn in the absence of ClP and NumP in the nominal layers. The absence of ClP accounts for the fact that [–count] CENs do not behave as regular mass nouns.