No abstract

No abstract

The aspectual opposition in Polish is encoded morphologically at the verb level. However, it is not immediately evident, whether by word-formation or inflectional means. Aspect marking is obligatory but semantically non-uniform and formally irregular. Traditionally, prefixed formations (e.g. "pisać" 'write, imperf.' – "na-pisać" 'write, perf.') have been regarded as products of word-formation, whereas suffixed forms (e.g. "kup-i•ć" 'buy, perf.' – "kup-owa•ć" 'buy, imperf.') as products of inflection. More recent approaches attempt to tip the scales in favour of a uniform process. The Polish data are analysed in an inferential-realisational Lexeme Morpheme Base Morphology framework. It is argued that the semantic information pertaining to event structure [±dynamic, ±durative, ±Consequent State] can be made available to syntax thanks to the mediation of the features [±Imperfective, ±Perfective] in the morpho-lexical representation of the verbal stem. At the point of lexical insertion, verb stems are already endowed with an abstractly specified value as perfective or imperfective and aspect information is lexically encoded as part of verb class specification. Consequently, the processes which alter aspect values are in the domain of the lexicon too.

Cross-linguistically, verbal nominalizations display a close semantic and syntactic affinity to their corresponding predicates. Another characteristic feature of action nominalizations is that they exhibit the process/result dichotomy. In the process of lexicalization, the meanings of nominals drift away from the core actional reading, and come to denote ‘something material connected with the verbal idea (agent, instrument, belongings, place or the like)’ (Marchand 1969, 303). Nominalizations in Irish show a systematic polysemy between an abstract action reading and more concrete meanings such as result or object of activity, e.g. míniú ‘explanation’, ceartú ‘correction’, filleadh ‘bend’. We can observe a cline with a non-count action nominal and a count result nominal as extremes. The ability to pluralize is a clear indicator of lexicalization, e.g. oiriúintí ‘fittings, accessories’, admhálacha ‘receipts’, socruithe sochraide ‘funeral arrangements’. It will be demonstrated that the patterns of polysemy in verbal nouns are constrained by the lexical semantics of the base verbs. In the paper an overview is made of nominals related to verbs of different situation types (i.e. Vendler’s (1967) classes such as states, accomplishments, achievements, activities), and different lexical semantic categories (i.e. verbs of creation, consumption, motion, speech act verbs, verbs of emission etc.). The study is based on the corpus of ca. 2300 verbs and their corresponding VNs from Ó Dónaill (1977).

Deverbal nominals in Irish support Grimshaw’s (1990) tripartite division into complex event (CE-), simple event (SE-) and result nominals (R-nominals). Irish nominals are ambiguous only between the SE- and R-status. There are no CE-nominals containing the AspP layer in their structure. SE-nominals (also found in Light Verb Constructions) are number-neutral and incapable of pluralizing and are represented as [nP[vP[Root]]]. R-nominals are devoid of the vP layer and behave like ordinary nouns. The Irish data point to v as the layer introducing event implications and the vP or PPs as the functional heads introducing the internal argument (Alexiadou and Schäfer 2011). Event denoting nominals in Irish can license the internal argument but aspectual modification and external argument licensing are not possible (cf. synthetic compounds in Greek (Alexiadou 2017)), which means that, counter to Borer (2013), the licensing of Argument Structure need not follow from the presence of the AspP layer.