A Cognitive-Functional Approach to Nominalization in English

Attenders or attendees? Deverbal -ee and -er variants in English

“…In this paper, I want to zoom in on the grey area of -ee and -er pairs with agentive, human reference, such as escaper-escapee and attender-attendee. In particular, I will show that careful qualitative analysis of actual empirical examples of such pairs largely confirms the in-depth semantic analysis of -er and -ee derivation presented in Heyvaert (2003Heyvaert ( , 2006: a majority of the agentive -er nouns and their -ee alternatives turn out to be systematic instantiations of their respective systems of nominalization with distinct meanings that can be traced back to that of the overall system which they belong to (of -er and -ee derivation).…”

“…Similarly, English as well as Dutch non-agentive -er nominalizations have been analyzed as non-systematic in nature (Keyser and Roeper, 1984;for Dutch: Booij, 1986;Taeldeman, 1990). Against this, I have argued that a unified analysis, which includes non-agentive -er and agentive -ee nominalizations and integrates the latter's formal and semantic properties into an overall account of -er and -ee derivation, is possible-for -er nominalization (Heyvaert, 2003) as well as for -ee derivation (Heyvaert, 2006). In this paper, I want to zoom in on the grey area of -ee and -er pairs with agentive, human reference, such as escaper-escapee and attender-attendee.…”

“…Because it is essential to have an understanding of the semantic and formal properties of the systems of -er and -ee nominalization in general, I will in section 2 briefly summarize the general analyses proposed in Heyvaert (2003) for -er nominalization and in Heyvaert (2006) for -ee derivation. Section 3 then presents the results of the corpus analysis which I carried out of a number of -ee and -er pairs.…”

English -ing-clauses and their problems: The structure of grammatical categories

“…One is that -ing is a so-called atemporalizing suffix (Langacker 1991;Heyvaert 2003), which means that when it is attached to a verbal stem the verbal process is depicted as a single gestalt without profiling the temporal sequentiality of its component states and without relating it to the time of speaking. The validity of atemporalization, as Langacker (1987: 253) admits, is hard to demonstrate empirically and the notion remains to some extent a theory-internal construct.…”

“…Gerunds are traditionally seen as nominalizations, meaning that while their internal syntax may be clausal, their external syntax is that of a noun phrase (Jespersen 1940;Lees 1966;Ross 1973;Declerck 1991;Heyvaert 2003;Hudson 2007: ch.4). For example, saying sorry in (1a) is a clause but outwardly behaves like a noun phrase in occurring in a nominal position as subject to fixes-therefore, it is a gerund.…”