nominalizations of french psychological verbs - Fachbereich ...

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JUDITH MEINSCHAEFFER
(2) a. La lettre l’a déçue.
“The letter deceived her.”
b. #La déception de la lettre m’a surpris.
“The deception of the letter surprised me.”
It is argued that the grammaticality contrast in (1) and (2) is correlated with
a difference in the semantic structure of the underlying verbs. It is further argued
that the contrast can be explained by assuming that the realization of arguments,
or better, of semantic participants, of derived nominalizations can be projected
from the underlying semantic form of the verbs involved, drawing on three
realization rules for semantic participants of nominalizations. The discussion is
restricted to psychological verbs and their derived nominalizations, because only
within this semantic class we find verbs showing the same surface syntax and
similar meaning, but presenting derived nouns contrasting crucially in how their
semantic participants can be realized.
The paper is structured as follows. Section 2 introduces some
characteristics of psychological verbs and nominalizations in French. In section
3, a number of descriptive generalizations about the realization of semantic
participants in psychological nominalizations are presented. Section 4 explores
the difference between classes of psychological verbs. In section 5, semantic
representations for three classes of psychological verbs are introduced. In section
6, I propose three participant-realization rules by means of which the descriptive
generalizations stated in section 3 can be derived from the semantic
representations given in section 5.
2. Psychological verbs as a semantic class
By psychological verbs, we mean verbs denoting an attitudinal or emotional
relation between two entities, where the precise nature of this relation is part of
the lexical meaning of the verb. Examples are given in (3).
(3) chagriner “grieve”, mépriser “scorn”, regretter “regret”, angoisser
“afflict”, amuser “amuse”, étonner “astonish”, fasciner “fascinate”
One constant property of psychological verbs appears to be that their semantic
representation (on some level) includes an entity experiencing the attitudinal or
emotional relation denoted by the verb; hence, these verbs are sometimes
subsumed under the class of ‘experiencer verbs’. In the examples given in (4),
the experiencing entity is realized as subject in (a), as direct object in (b), and as
indirect object in (c).