nominalizations of french psychological verbs - Fachbereich ...

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JUDITH MEINSCHAEFFER
affixation, as in (6c). Finally, we find non-derived psychological nominals, as in
(6d).
(6) a. admiration “admiration”, from admirer “admire”
b. étonnement “astonishment”, from étonner “astonish”
c. regret “regret”, from regretter “regret”
d. intérêt “interest”, from Latin interest “it is important”
A crucial difference between verbs and derived nominalizations is that for
verbs, syntactic realization of semantic participants is obligatory, while for
nominalizations (as well as for non-derived nominals) it is optional. Therefore, it
is controversial whether the syntactic complements of nominalizations
corresponding to arguments of the base verbs should be termed arguments too, or
whether they should rather be classified as adjuncts (e.g., Dowty 1989;
Grimshaw 1990; Zucchi 1993:135; Alexiadou 2001:66). This question is not
addressed here; when referring to phrases like de Max (‘de-phrase’) or pour sa
faute (‘pour-phrase’), the term ‘complement’ is used. Likewise, we do not speak
of arguments of lexemes as bearing thematic roles, but we do speak of semantic
participants of events denoted by lexemes as bearing the semantic or conceptual
roles ‘experiencing entity’ and ‘target or cause of the experience’. We then say
that the complements of derived nominalizations realize the semantic
participants of the event denoted by the nominalization, or that they refer to the
semantic participants.
In French, nominalizations derived from psychological verbs basically
dispose of three types of syntactic constructions to realize semantic participants
in the event denoted: prepositional phrases headed by de “of”, prepositional
phrases headed by prepositions other than de, such as par “by” and pour “for”,
and possessive determiners like son, sa “his, her, its”. The distribution of
possessive determiners is not discussed here (cf. Zubizarreta 1987:68).
First, de-phrases can realize both the experiencing entity and the target or
cause of the experience, (7b) and (7c). The sentence given in (7a) serves to
disambiguate the conceptual roles of the two semantic participants.
(7) a. Max regrette sa faute.
“Max regrets his mistake.”
b. le regret de Max
“the regret of Max”
c. le regret de la faute
“the regret of the mistake”