Abstract
This paper explores the distribution of deverbal nouns and nominalized infinitives that are built on transitive verbs and occur in eventive interpretations. The study is empirically oriented and based on an acceptability judgment experiment in which argument realization and interpretational possibilities are manipulated as the independent variables. The results show that deverbal nouns prefer but are not limited to realizing the lower argument of the base, whereas nominalized infinitives are mostly restricted to realizing the higher argument. Furthermore, deverbal nouns turn out to be insensitive with regard to the distinction between episodic and generic event readings, while nominalized infinitives are shown to be specialized on generic interpretations. Deverbal nouns and nominalized infinitives are, thus, mostly neither paradigmatically interchangeable nor complementarily distributed as nominalized infinitives reach the same degree of acceptability as deverbal nouns only under very narrow conditions. With regard to the ecological validity of the experimental approach, a comparison to corpus data indicates that high frequency clearly correlates with acceptability, but that the same does not hold for low frequency and unacceptability, that is forms that are not (sufficiently) attested in the corpus do not necessarily receive low ratings within the judgment task. The study, thus, also addresses a number of methodological issues in the study of event nominals.
Highlights
Spanish has multiple means for building event-denoting nominalizations (NOM) of verbal bases
These are deverbal nouns (DVN), which can be built with a variety of productive affixes, and nominalized infinitives (NI), which come in different syntactic subtypes
The models that were fitted for DVN and NI respectively, include by-item random slopes for the factor argument realization as there is a high amount of variation between individual items in this respect
Summary
Spanish has multiple means for building event-denoting nominalizations (NOM) of verbal bases. In Spanish, the question of which factors determine the distribution of different NOM is interesting as both morphological and syntactic devices are available. These are deverbal nouns (DVN), which can be built with a variety of productive affixes, and nominalized infinitives (NI), which come in different syntactic subtypes. Spanish NI can be regarded as “syntactic NOM” in the sense of Chomsky (1970) as their formation is fully productive and they systematically denote the same event as their base verb In this respect, they differ, for instance, from NI in present-day French which are limited to fully lexicalized uses like le déjeuner ‘lunch’ or le plaisir ‘pleasure’. They mostly occur in certain registers typical of written language and are severely restricted in their distribution
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