nominalizations of french psychological verbs - Fachbereich ...

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JUDITH MEINSCHAEFFER
Finally, prepositional phrases headed by pour were said to occur only with
ES-nominalizations, but not with EO- nominalizations; they can refer to the target
of the experience, but not to the experiencing entity. This observation, however,
immediately raises the question why for EO- nominalizations the target of the
experience cannot be realized in a pour-phrase. What is then the relevant
difference between ES-verbs and EO-verbs of the fasciner-type? One difference
consists in the aspectual type of the verbs: ES-verbs are stative, while EOfasciner-verbs
are non-stative.
Evidence that stativity is indeed a factor governing the distribution of pourphrases
can be gained from the examples in (25), showing that pour-phrases are
grammatical with nominalizations of the fascination-type, but only under certain
circumstances.
(25) a. la fascination progressive de ce livre / par ce livre
“the growing fascination of this book / by this book”
b. l’énorme fascination de ce livre / #par ce livre
“the enormous fascination of this book / by this book”
c. une énorme fascination pour ce livre
“an enormous fascination for this book”
As shown by (25a), fascination is a process nominalization (as demonstrated by
the adjective progressif “growing”); it is compatible with a de-phrase or parphrase.
(25b) shows that fascination can have a second interpretation: it can
occur with the degree-modifying adjective énorme “enormous”, which we
assume to modify (stative) qualities, but not (non-stative) processes. Thus, when
fascination has a stative interpretation, as in (25b), the de-phrase is still possible,
but the par-phrase appears to be less felicitous. Importantly, with a stative
interpretation, fascination is compatible also with a pour-phrase, as in (25c). We
therefore propose that the rule in (26) regulates the interpretation of pourphrases.
(26) Rule 3: Pour-phrases can refer to the second semantic participant
introduced by PSYCH_RELATION, i.e., to the target of experience, of
stative predicates.
To conclude, this section has shown that the distribution and interpretation
of syntactic complements of psychological nominalizations can be derived from
the semantic representations introduced in section 5, by drawing on three
additional rules governing the realization of semantic participants by three types
of syntactic complements. The lexical representations and the participant-