Functional shift as category underspecification

Abstract

Focusing on words such as bag, hammer, kiss, and dance, which are subject to functional shift, i.e. alternate between noun and verb, this article argues against the traditional view that a category-changing rule derives verbs from nouns and vice versa. The alternative proposal is that root lexemes in general, and words like these in particular, are semantically underspeci®ed with respect to the noun/verb distinction. The lexical semantic representations of such words include event schemas that are compatible with either noun or verb meanings. The verb vs. noun aspect of the meanings is supplied by the morphosyntactic contexts in which they appear. This analysis is shown to account straightforwardly for the general properties of functional shift, such as its ubiquity, productivity, and semantic regularity, and to be supported by both standard kinds of distributional evidence and neurolinguistic evidence.

Beyond dichotomies : on the nature and classification of compound verbs in English

“…Thus conceptualizing and linguistically encoding a knowledge structure as a nominal or verbal lexeme is an underspecified option of alternation (Farrell 2001 Cruse (2004: 222-227) in defining philonyms, xenonyms and tautonyms, postulates that "it is the duty of a non-head to bring information not available in the head." If the semantic non-head brings into the composition information which is already contained in the head, the result will be a tautonymy.…”

“…A way to avoid duplication of cognitive effort and analytical difficulties is to side with Farrell's (2001) contention that nominal/verbal construal is a matter of alternative profiling of underspecified symbolic units which are related via functional shifts.…”

The noun/verb and predicate/argument structures

“…The observation that English has a class of stems that are flexible with respect to N/V is not new (Jespersen 1924). Farrell (2001) has argued for category underspecification and against zero derivation for such English stems. There are three possibilities with stems like work, love, kill, walk, etc.…”

“…The question whether (16) or (17) is more plausible of the two lies outside the scope of the present study; in fact, it is possible that both are wrong, as the existence of any of the five types cannot be precluded at this point. society, life, prairie, child, lizard), verbs (agree, write, ask, comprehend, engage) and flexibles (round, love, kill, walk, run) (Bierwisch 2001;Don & van Lier 2007;Farrell 2001;Jespersen 1924;Vogel 2000). …”

Conversion in English and its implications for Functional Discourse Grammar

“…(iii) Words are listed in the lexicon as roots without lexical category and they acquire different interpretations or categories in syntax (Marantz, 2001;Don and van Lier, 2007;Farrell, 2001). Under this view, therefore, conversion is not a morphological process, but a syntactic one.…”