Compositionality in verbs and nominalizations A (radically) formal approach

• Published in: Isogloss Vol. 10; no. 6; pp. 1 - 40
• Main Author: Boechat de Medeiros, Alessandro
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Bellaterra Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona, Servei de Publicacions 03-10-2024
• Subjects: Argument structure; Brazilian Portuguese; Compositionality; Distributed morphology; Predicate; Semantics; Syntax; Theoretical linguistics; Verbs; Word meaning
• ISSN: 2385-4138; 2385-4138
• DOI: 10.5565/rev/isogloss.462

This work is about verb nominalizations and the relation between these forms, the argument structure of their verbal bases, and verbs’ possible meanings. Since Chomsky’s seminal work (Chomsky, 1970), nominalizations have become a window to investigate fundamental aspects of argument structure and assess linguistic theory. Following such a tradition, adopting the framework of Distributed Morphology (Halle; Marantz, 1993; Marantz, 1997, 2013b) and using Brazilian Portuguese data, this paper explores typical nominal forms derived from various kinds of Brazilian Portuguese verbs to evaluate a specific proposal of constructionist argument structure theory found in Medeiros (2018). The BP data show that syntactic-semantic decompositions of verb phrases are at least partially preserved in their derived nominal forms in a very systematic manner, and that these forms maintain the complex structural meaning in all kinds of situations – even when these are interpreted as result nominals. This work also provides some innovative syntactic-semantic means to deal with result nominals interpreted as entities (as in the case of construção (construction)), showing how to obtain, compositionally, such entity readings, demonstrating that even in these cases there are clear reflexes of event meanings.