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Preprint

French

ID: <

10670/1.rondni

>

Where these data come from
The investigator, the supervisor and the detainee. Names of participants in the event.

Abstract

This paper addresses the formation of French deverbal nominals denoting participants in the event(uality) (agent, patient, holder, etc.). We first show that -eur nominals - so-called " agent " nominals - fall into three categories: episodic, dispositional and referential nominals. Bipartite classifications (in terms of [inanimate] vs [eventive] as in Rappaport-Hovav and Levin (1992), or [episodic] vs [dispositional] as in Alexiadou and Schäfer to appear), cannot capture the properties of these nominals, at least in French. We also show that the event interpretation of these nominals depends not only on the presence of argument structure, but also on the specific vs. non-specific nature of the argument structure they realize, refining the predictions in the classical literature on eventive deverbal nominals (since Grimshaw 1990). This is nevertheless true only in the case of nominalizations of arguments: -ant nominals, which apparently compete with -eur nominals, show a different behavior which indicates that they are phrasal. Here, the nominalized structure inherits aspectual properties from the internal verb phrase, but presents also an aspectual shift induced by the fact that there is nominalization of a predicative phrase which is therefore stative. Nominals denoting internal arguments, i.e. -é/-i/-u nominals, which nominalise passive participants to events, confirm the generalization derived for-eur nominals, since, by default, they realize a specific argument structure and they can only be episodic. The general picture that emerges allows us to explain how the properties of nominalized predicates are inherited in deverbal nominals denoting participants in the events, by showing how genericity and episodicity are structurally inherited or built-up in these nominalizations.

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