Summary of the work in project B1b: "Deverbal nominals at the semantics-pragmatics interface"


as part of the project B1 (Alexiadou & von Heusinger) "The formation and interpretation of derived nominals"
in the SFB 732 "Incremental Specification in Context" funded by the DFG

7/2006 - 6/2010


Summary

The working hypothesis of the overall project was that deverbal nouns (nominalizations) show a higher systematicity in deriving different readings than root nouns. The different readings of deverbal nouns are all derived from the underlying (verbal) event meaning and can be reconstructed according to rules. On the other side, different meanings of root nouns are motivated by contingent (i.e. world dependent) facts. The project aimed at investigating the underlying semantic and pragmatic processes of these two different patterns. We found that (i) different readings of deverbal nouns show a similarity pattern that can be modelled by shared semantic features (±duration, ±abstract, etc.). The distance of one reading from the underlying event reading can be measured by the amount of same features. The distance also shows grammatical effects. (ii) Certain suffixes, such as -er, are underspecified forms that need conceptual information to denote a particular reading (see von Heusinger & Schwarze 2006, von Heusinger 2009), while -ung allows for different readings that are rather selected by contextual information. (iii) In certain environments (copredication), the contextual clues trigger two disjunct readings of a nominalization in -ung - still the sentence is correct (other than with -er-forms). Therefore we investigated the pragmatic process of "predicate transfer" (Nunberg 2004) for the contextual environment of nominalizations. This analysis is the first that applies Nunberg's schema to nominalization and elaborates it for copredication cases. The original results of this investigation show that in certain contexts, the context of the nominalization changes its meaning (by coercion or enrichment), rather than the nominalization itself. Moreover, we have identified constraints on this mechanism concerning copredication. (iv) We extended our investigation by questionnaires, which have shown that additional pragmatic processes (salience, noteworthiness) play a crucial role for predicate transfer and thus the choice of a particular reading for a nominalization. Thus the project was quite successful to show that additional pragmatic rules are necessary to understand the distribution of different readings for nominalization.


People:

Klaus von Heusinger (7/2006-6/2010 principal investigator)
Regine Brandtner (9/2006-3/2007 student assistant, 4/2007-06/2010 researcher)
Hanna Weiland (9/2006-3/2009 student assistant)
Sam Featherson (04/2009-06/2009 advisor)


Publications

In preparation

von Heusinger, K. & Schwarze, C. (in preparation). Italian V+N Compounds in a two Level Semantics.

Featherston, S., von Heusinger, K. & Weiland, H. (in preparation). Context salience and meaning shift. An empirical investigation


2010

Brandtner, R. & von Heusinger, K. (2010). Nominalization in Context - Conflicting Readings and Predicate Transfer. In A. Alexiadou & M. Rathert (eds.), Nominalizations across Languages and Frameworks. Berlin: de Gruyter (Series Interface explorations).


2009

von Heusinger, K. 2009. Zur Bedeutung von Derivationen an der Schnittstelle von lexikalischer Semantik und konzeptueller Struktur. Deutsche Sprache.


2008

Brandtner, R. 2008. Meaning Transfer and the Compositional Semantics of Nominalizations.
In F. Schäfer (ed.), SinSpeC (1): Working Papers of the SFB 732 "Incremental Specification in Context". Online Publikationsverbund der Universität Stuttgart (OPUS). p.17-32
http://elib.uni-stuttgart.de/opus/volltexte/2008/3546/pdf/SinSpeC1_2_Brandtner.pdf


2006

von Heusinger, K. & Schwarze, C. 2006. Underspecification in the Semantics of Word-Formation. The Case of Denominal Verbs of Removal in Italian. Linguistics 44. p.1165-1194


Dissertation

Brandtner, R. (defense July 1, 2010). Deverbal nominals in context. Meaning variation and copredication. Dissertation, Universität Stuttgart


Magisterarbeiten (magister theses)

2009

Weiland, H. 2009. Empirische Untersuchung zur Koprädikation bei derverbalen -ung-Nominalisierungen im Deutschen. Magisterarbeit, Universität Stuttgart


2008

Priwisch, N. 2008. Wortbildungswandel im Deutschen. Ein Vergleich zwischen den Suffixen -bar und -lich. Magisterarbeit, Universität Stuttgart


2007

Brandtner, R. 2007. Konzeptuelle Bedeutungsverschiebungen im Kontext. Eine Gegenüberstellung der Theorien von Bierwisch, Pustejovsky und Nunberg. Magisterarbeit, Universität Stuttgart.

Marktstädter, N. 2007. Bildung der Nomina agentis im Deutschen und Russischen im Vergleich. Magisterarbeit, Universität Stuttgart.


Talks

2010

Brandtner, R. "Ereignisse, Resultate und Partizipanten- Koprädikation mit deverbalen Nominalisierungen."
Talk held at the workshop "Die Zugänglichkeit impliziter Ereignisse", University of Tübingen, July 20

Brandtner, R. "Deverbal nominalization and copredication"
Talk held at the Université de Genève, Switzerland, February 23

von Heusinger, K. (U. Stuttgart) & Schwarze, C.(U. Konstanz) "Italian V+N compounds in a two-level semantics"
Talk held at the Università Ca’Foscari, Venice, March 15


2009

Brandtner, R. "Events and their results- pragmatic constraints on copredication"
Talk held at the Console XVIII conference, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, December 19

Brandtner, R. "Deverbal Nominalization - Constraints on copredication"
Talk held at the group meeting of the language and linguistics program, Department of Computer science at Brandeis University, Massachusetts, USA, January 27

Brandtner, R. "Nominalizations at the semantics - pragmatics interface"
Talk held at the annual workshop of the Institute for Linguistics/German, Hohenheim, January 9


2008

Brandtner, R. "Event, state and the rest - towards a subclassification of "other" readings"
Talk held at the workshop "Semantic features in derivational morphology", Stuttgart, May 31

Von Heusinger, K. & Schwarze, C. "Meaning construction of Italian V+N compounds"
Talk held at the workshop "Semantic features in derivational morphology", Stuttgart, May 30

Von Heusinger, K. & Schwarze, C. "Italian V+N compounds in a two-level semantics"
Talk held at Konstanz University, May 2008


2007

Brandtner, R. "Konzeptuelle Bedeutungsverschiebungen im Kontext"
Talk held at the annual workshop of the Institute for Linguistics/German,Stuttgart, February 9

Brandtner, R. "Meaning Transfer and (deverbal) nominalizations"
Talk held at the annual meeting of the linguistic graduate school 609 of Stuttgart University, Söllerhaus (Austria), June 26

Brandtner, R. & von Heusinger, K. "Meaning Transfer and the Compositional Semantics of Nominalizations"
Talk held at the workshop "Nominalizations across languages", Stuttgart University, November 30

Von Heusinger, K. & Schwarze, C. "Italian V+N compounds in a two-level semantics"
6th Mideteranean Morphology Meeting University of Patras, Ithaca, Greece, September


2006

Von Heusinger, K. "Polysemie in der Derivation. Die Interaktion von lexikalischer und konzeptueller Information". Talk held at the Workshop "Systematische Polysemie", IDS Mannheim, May


Invited guests, discussion groups and workshops

2010
Alice ter Meulen (University of Geneva): "Temporal reasoning: The interaction of aspectual adverbs and determiners."

2009
Germana Civilleri, visiting phD student from the Università Roma Tre (September - December). Dissertation project: "Deverbal Nominals in Ancient Greek".

Peter Bosch (University of Osnabruck): "A denotational view of polysemy" + discussion group

2008
Chiara Melloni (University of Verona): "Action Nominals Inside: Lexical semantics in Morphology" + discussion group

International workshop "Semantic features in derivational morphology", Stuttgart University (with Simone Heinold and Melanie Uth) + discussion group with Manfred Bierwisch

2007
Alice ter Meulen (Centre for Language and Cognition, Groningen): "Transition in context" + discussion


Research visits, summer schools and visited external workshops
(Regine Brandtner)

07 / 2010
participant and speaker at the conference "Die Zugänglichkeit impliziter Ereignisse", University of Tübingen

12 / 2009
participant and speaker at the ConSOLE XVIII conference, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain

01-03 / 2009
research visit: Brandeis University (James Pustejovsky), Boston, Massachusetts

03 / 2008
participant at the "Atelier Jeunes Chercheurs" and the conference "Journées de Sémantique et Modélisation", Toulouse, France

03 / 2008
DGfS (annual conference of the German foundation for linguistics), Bamberg

03 / 2007
DGfS (annual conference of the German foundation for linguistics), Siegen

05 / 2007
"What's new in grammaticalization" conference, Free University Berlin

06 / 2007
participant at the annual summer school of the "Netherlands Graduate School of Linguistics" (LOT), Leuven University, Belgium

07 / 07&08
participant at the annual convention of the graduate school 609 (Stuttgart University), Söllerhaus, Austria

12 / 2007
Ereignissemantik (event semantics) conference, Tübingen University

08 / 2006
participant at the "DGfS & GLOW Summer School", Stuttgart University


Related research seminars at the University of Stuttgart

SS 2009
FS "Empirical methods in linguistics" (Sam Featherston)

WS 08/09
HS "Schnittstellen im Lexikon" (Brandtner, Onea)

FS "Basic texts in semantics" (von Heusinger, Kamp)

WS 07/08
FS "Semantik und Pragmatik: Semantic Minimalism" (von Heusinger, Kamp)

SS 07
HS "Empirische Methoden der Sprachwissenschaft" (von Heusinger, Klein)

WS 06/07
Doktorandenkolloquium "Semantics" (von Heusinger)