Result nominals: A lexical semantic investigation

This article deals with semantically ambiguous event/result nominalisations and is aimed at showing and explaining why only certain classes of base verbs yield the relevant semantic ambiguity in their derived nominals, while other classes only give unambiguous event nominals. In particular, the focus of the investigation is on the lexical semantic characterisation of the base verbs and, more specifically, on the identification of those structural and conceptual semantic properties that are indispensable for yielding a result nominal. We accordingly propose a verbal taxonomy crucially based on the ontological concept of 'result', and formally represent the nominalisation process by means of the theoretical apparatus proposed by Lieber (2004). Specifically, we contend that the morpho-syntactic and semantic properties of result nominals can be derived through an accurate lexical decomposition of the base verbs and of the suffixes, and by implementing the co-indexation mechanism that drives the nominalisation process.