Download Aspect cross-categorially: states in nominalizations DATA. In

Aspect cross-categorially: states in nominalizations
DATA.
In the study of nominalizations (Chomsky 1970, Grimshaw 1990, Alexiadou
2001), a great deal of attention has been devoted to event nouns, (1), or to object
nouns, (2), which express non-aspectual notions corresponding to some participants in
the event. In this paper we focus on a third class of nominalizations, much less
studied, (3), which, we argue, denote states.
(1)
(2)
(3)
The building of this bridge took place in 1583.
A stone building is standing there.
John’s preoccupation about the economy is noticeable.
It is not very difficult to show that states are indeed different from both event and
object nouns. Unlike events, state nominals do not combine with take place, (4a);
unlike objects, they are able to occupy a temporal extension, (4b):
(4)
a. *Her preoccupation took place when the crisis started.
b. A preoccupation of several months.
These and many other empirical properties that will be presented –including
compatibility with PP temporal modifiers or the temporal reading of adjectives such
as long (Martin, 2009)– lead us to formally motivate the class of nominal states,
comparable to that of verbal states in denoting strongly homogeneous situations
which satisfy the so-called subinterval condition (Rothstein, 2004).
PROBLEM. In the verbal domain two different classes of states –both fulfilling the
subinterval condition– are generally distinguished (Maienborn 2003, Rothmayr 2009).
The first class, Davidsonian states or D-states, are pseudo-stative verbs which contain
a davidsonian event argument, and include verbs like lie, sit, wait or glow; the second
class, Kimian states or K-states, are stative predicates which do not contain any event
argument whatsoever, like own, weigh or cost. The question that arises at this point is
to which class state nouns belong and why. We will show through several tests taken
from Maienborn (2003) and Rothmayr (2009) and applied to Spanish data, that state
nominalizations systematically denote K-states even if the corresponding verb denotes
a D-state. Among other properties, notice that even when a stative verb accepts
modifiers that locate the event (which is a sign of being a D-state), the corresponding
nominalization rejects them:
(5)
a. Juan se aburre con la naturaleza en la escuela.
‘Juan SE is-bored with the nature in the school’
b. El aburrimiento de Juan con la naturaleza (*en la escuela)
‘The boredom of Juan with the nature (in the school)’
(5a) means that the state of being bored only holds when Juan is at school (but maybe
he enjoys nature in the park); this modifier is unavailable in the nominalization (5b).
Similar data with manner modifiers show altogether that the nominalization behaves
as a K-state even if the base verb is a D-state.
ANALYSIS. We propose an analysis of these cases that takes into account the specific
type of state denoted by nominalizations, and more in particular the distinction
between Davidsonian (D-)state and Kimian (K-) state (Maienborn 2003, Rothmayr
2009). We show that all stative nominalizations take the K-state part of a predicate;
when this primitive is not available the state nominalization becomes ungrammatical.
The ungrammaticality of (5b), thus, is explained because the predicate denotes a Dstate which does not contain a K-state, while the predicate in (5a) describes a D-state
containing a K-state. This difference is shown by the entailment relationships between
the verb and the participle in (6a) and (6b):
(6)
a. El vaso se ha roto
<---> El vaso está roto.
‘The glass SE has broken’
‘The glass is broken’
b. Juan se ha aburrido
---> Juan está aburrido.
‘Juan SE has got-bored’
‘Juan is bored.’
In (6a) the perfect form of the verb entails the state expressed by the participle and
viceversa (Koontz-Garboden, 2009). We contend that this is due to the fact that both
grammatical forms express the same D-state. In contrast, in (6b), the perfect form
entails the state, but the state can be true without the perfect being true (for example,
if someone is chronically bored and never experienced the opposite state). We argue
that this is explained if aburrirse denotes a D-state which also contains a K-state
(expressed by the ESTAR + PARTICIPLE construction), in such a way that the truth of
the D-state forces the K-state to be also true, but not the other way round. Romperse,
in contrast, does not contain a K-state, as the state denoted here must come out as a
result of a previous change. Consequently, the nominalization cannot express a state,
and the noun rotura ‘break’ can never mean the state of being broken. In general, any
verb that denotes a state which can only be attained through a previous change is
unable to give state nominalizations; only the verbs that contain target states (Parsons
1990, Kratzer, 2000) –states which do not require a previous change– can produce
them. Any destruction verb (die, destroy, burn...) requires a previous change to attain
the state, and thus none of them produces a state nominalization.
CONSEQUENCES AND IMPLICATIONS. Our analysis has implications for a) the relation
between D- and K-states, as the data suggest that D-states can be constructed on top
of K-states, sometimes involving some additional morphology; b) the proper way of
decomposing predicates into primitive notions in the aspectual domain; c) the proper
way of integrating the target-state / result-state distinction with the K-state / D-state
distinction, as these data point to a tight connection between the first members of each
group; d) the connection between participles and nominalizations (noticed, for
example, in Alexiadou 2001), as the nominalization is able to denote only the
aspectual notions expressed through the participle of the corresponding verb.
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Readings in English Transformational Grammar. Waltham: Ginn and Co. // J.Grimshaw (1990).
Argument structure. Cambridge, MITPress // A.Koontz-Garboden (2009). Anticausativization. NLLT
27 // A. Kratzer (2000).Building statives. Proceedings of the 26th BerkeleyLS // C. Maienborn (2003).
Die logische Form von Kopula-Sätzen. Berling: Akademike Vorlag // F.Martin (2009) Stage level and
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