Action nominals inside: Lexical-semantic issues

The main aim of this paper is to investigate a relevant portion of Event/Result polysemy by focusing on its regular patterns and looking "inside" action nominals, hence paying attention to verbal semantics, rather than examining their behaviour in the syntactic context. The hypothesis I will develop is that it is possible to predict (at least to a certain extent) the potential polysemy of action nominals by exploring the structural and, especially, the conceptual semantics of the base verb. The analysis of several verb classes will allow us to capture the semantic features of the relevant argument or semantic participant of the base that semantically corresponds to the referential noun (cf. §§ 3, 3.1). In particular, I will isolate the conceptual- semantic (cf. §3.1.1), thematic (§3.2) and aspectual features (§3.3) of the heterogeneous class of result / referential nouns. I will finally conclude by speculating about the relation between polysemy effects in the simplex and in the complex lexicon domains (cf. §4) and advancing an explanatory hypothesis about the derivational pattern responsible for the event/result polysemy (cf. §5).