nominalizations of french psychological verbs - Fachbereich ...

244
JUDITH MEINSCHAEFFER
verbs. In section 6, it is shown that, drawing on three additional realization rules,
the correct distribution of the different types of complements to psychological
nominalizations can be derived from the semantic representations proposed for
the verbs.
5. Semantic representations for psychological verbs
It is a commonly held assumption in lexical semantics that the meaning of a
lexeme can be decomposed into atomic predicates. One of the basic claims of
such an approach is that verbs sharing certain atomic predicates also share some
of their grammatical properties. Hence, the decompositional semantic
representation of a lexeme is claimed to encode not only the meaning, but also
some of the grammatical properties of this lexeme. Within a decompositional
framework, the analysis presented here aims at deriving the argument-realizing
properties of three different classes of psychological nominalizations from the
meaning of the underlying verbs. To this end, I propose that the meanings of the
three verb classes from which the nominalizations are derived can be represented
as in (19).
(19) a. regretter PSYCH_RELATION (x, y)
b. fasciner CAUSE (ACT (y), PSYCH_RELATION (x, y))
c. étonner CAUSE (ACT (y), CHANGE (PSYCH_STATE (x))) 4
The decompositional representations are intended to be interpreted in terms
of the paraphrases given in (20).
(20) a. “If x regrets y, then x stands in a psychological relation to y.”
b. “If y fascinates x, then some action of y causes x to stand in a
psychological relation to y.”
c. “If y astonishes x, then some action of y causes x to come to be
in a psychological state.”
Note that, since we are interested here in expressing generalizations concerning
the relation between semantic participants and syntactic complements, but not in
properties of individual lexical items, the representations in (19) consist entirely
of highly general atomic predicates like CAUSE, ACT, PSYCH_STATE, termed ‘base
predicates’, abstracting away from semantic differences which do not appear to
be reflected in the syntactic realization of semantic participants.
4 For this class of psychological verbs, similar representations have been proposed by Wanner (2001)
and Iwata (1995). The assumption that EO-verbs are causative is also made in some syntactic
accounts of psychological verbs (e.g., Pesetsky 1995).