Lexicalization Patterns in Nominals Derived from Verbs of Creation in Polish

Abstract

Action nominalizations are commonly acknowledged as being semantically ambiguous. Since the publication of Grimshaw’s (1990) seminal monograph research on nominalizations has centered on the verb-like syntactic characteristics of Complex-Event nominals and therefore the area of Result nominals remains understudied. The present article provides an analysis of lexicalization patterns and the Event/Result meaning contrast displayed by the deverbal action nominals derived from creation and re-description verbs in Polish such as kompozycja ‘composition’, konstrukcja ‘construction’ and tłumaczenie ‘translation’. The Polish data are also compared with other European languages. The proposed analysis adopts a Lexicalist approach to the analysis of action nouns (Bloch-Trojnar 2013) and is based on the Generative Lexicon model proposed by Pustejovsky (1995, 2005). The model is useful on account of its detailed representation of event structure (Pustejovsky 1991, 1995), the introduction of the notion of dot-objects – a formal mechanism which allows to account for cases of logical/complementary polysemy and the recognition of the so-called Qualia structure in the semantic representation, which is crucial in explaining the possible paths of lexicalization in action nominalizations, as demonstrated for Italian by Ježek (2008), Melloni (2011) and Ježek and Melloni (2011). A similar line of reasoning is applied to the Polish data.