Aspectual features and categorial shift: deverbal nominals in German and English

Publication date: Available online 27 October 2018Source: Language SciencesAuthor(s): Ulrike DemskeAbstractThe point of departure of this paper is the claim by Heyvaert, Maekelberghe & Buyle (this issue) that the suffix -ing has no aspectual meaning in English gerunds. Rather, the interpretation of nominal and verbal gerunds depends, so they argue, on situation or viewpoint aspect, a claim that contradicts the wide-spread view that the aspectual meaning of English gerunds is brought about by the nominalizing suffix. The present paper addresses the issue from a comparative perspective, focusing on German ung-nominals: while they share aspectual features with their English counterparts, empirical evidence from productivity, distribution, and argument linking shows (i) that the derivational suffix -ung imposes aspectual restrictions on possible verb bases, and (ii) that with respect to argument linking, the deverbal nominal favors the state component of a complex event predicate over its process component. From the historical record of German, we learn that these aspectual restrictions do not hold for ung-nominals in earlier periods of German. With the rise of aspectual restrictions, the nominalization pattern turns more nominal resulting in a position further towards the nominal end of the deverbalization continuum. It appears, then, that it is only in the historical pariods of German that ung-nominals pattern with English nominals as regards their aspectual features. Currently...
Source: Language Sciences - Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research