[Lingtyp] Lexical nominalisation of property concepts

Sun Jun 12 00:20:34 UTC 2016

Hi David,
It seems from your message here and from your chapter in WALS that the English construction with one and the Chinese construction with de are of the same type structurally. I don’t know if I have read you right, but although they are made up of the word representing a property concept followed by another word, the two constructions are quite different (and the natures of all of the words involved are different as well). In the relevant use of English one, it is a pro-form (see  Goldberg, Adele E. & Laura A. Michaelis. 2016. One among many: anaphoric one and its relationship to numeral one. Cognitive Science 40.4:1–26. DOI: 10.1111/cogs.12339  for interesting discussion) and clearly the head of the phrase, but in the Chinese example de is only a nominalizer and clearly not the head of the phrase, either in terms of structural behaviour (e.g. in English one patterns like other heads, e.g. we can say “this one”, but this is not the case with Chinese de) or in terms of speakers’ “feel” for what is the core element of the phrase.

This sort of goes back to the discussion on categorization we had back in January.

All the best,
Randy
-----
Prof. Randy J. LaPolla, PhD FAHA （羅仁地）| Division of Linguistics and Multilingual Studies | Nanyang Technological University
HSS-03-45, 14 Nanyang Drive, Singapore 637332 | Tel: (65) 6592-1825 GMT+8h | Fax: (65) 6795-6525 | http://randylapolla.net/

On 11 Jun 2016, at 3:33 pm, David Gil <gil at shh.mpg.de<mailto:gil at shh.mpg.de>> wrote:

Luigi,

Unlike many of my typologist colleagues who seek refuge from the muddy waters of formal criteria in the supposed clarity of semantics, I find semantic criteria to often be just as problematical, if not more so, than their formal counterparts.

For the purposes of my WALS map, I did not use headedness as a defining criteria, and I would not wish to take a stand on the headedness in the examples that you discuss.  By "adjective" I meant property-denoting word one of whose typical functions is as an attribute of a noun, and by "noun" I meant thing-denoting word.  The map shows the morphosyntactic strategies that a language uses to allow an adjective to occur in a noun slot — typically, but not criterially, heading a phrase that occurs in an argument position.  This definition is met, among others, by the one in English beautiful one, the de in Mandarin hong de, and also by the lack of (dedicated adjective-to-noun conversion) marking in the Italian il bello.

Best,

David

On 10/06/2016 23:01, Luigi Talamo wrote:
Dear all,
thanks a lot for your all answers, I really appreciate that.
I have found your data very interesting, many comments will follow :-)
I begin below with David's answer.

One of the two kinds of nominalization mentioned in the query ('beautiful' > 'beautiful one') is the subject of my WALS map #61 "Adjectives without Nouns".

David

Thanks David, I have read your WALS map at the beginning of my work; maybe you remember that we have exchanged a couple of e-mails some time ago. As you mention in the WALS article, the most important issue here is whether adjectives are syntactic heads in constructions such as 'the white one', which translates in Italian as 'quello bianco'. As you probably noticed, I did not consider these constructions in my study, as they appear to me to be more 'predicative' than 'referential', at least in Italian; moreover, the syntactic head of the Italian construction is most likely the deictic quello 'this'. But what about the Mandarin example that is reported in your map, Wǒ yào hóng de. ? Is hóng a property concept with referential function ?

Thanks

Luigi

On 09/06/2016 21:14, Luigi Talamo wrote:
Dear all,
I am conducting a research on the lexical nominalisation of property concepts in contemporary Italian. My study involves two types of nominalisation strategy, affixation such as bello `beautiful' -> bell-ezza `beauty (abstract concept)' and zero-marking ('conversion'), such as bello (adj) -> `(il) bello' -> `the beautiful person', `beauty (abstract concept)' and `what is beautiful about something'.
Drawing mostly from 'Leipzig Questionnaire On Nominalisation and mixed Categories' (Malchukov et alii (2008)) and studies on adjectival and mixed categories, I have elaborated a series of morpho-syntactic and semantic parameters, which I have employed to study de-adjectival nominalizations in actual, corpus-based contexts.
I would like to insert in my study some cross-linguistic notes on the phenomenon, which I hope to further study from a typological perspective. I will be glad if you can provide me some examples from your languages of expertise. I have found some examples of de-adjectival nominalizations here and there in grammars, but I was not able to exactly figure out which are the parameters involved; moreover, some recent works (among others, Roy (2010), Alexiadou et alii (2010), Alexiadou & Iordachioaia (2014)) give interesting insights on de-adjectival nominalization, but examples are limited to European languages.

I am particularly interested in non-European languages showing a distinct class of adjectives; morpho-syntatic parameters include case, number, gender, definiteness and specificity, degree, external argument structure and, possibly, verbal parameters, which are however not very significant for Italian de-adjectival nominalisation; semantic parameters include referent animacy, the distinction between the nominalisation of the adjectival 'argument' vs. the nominalisation of the adjective itself e.g., softie `a thing which is soft' vs. softness and the semantic type of property concepts e.g., PHYSICAL PROPERTY or HUMAN PROPENSITY.

So, possible questions are as following:
1. Can property concepts be turned into nouns?
2. Which strategies are employed for this purpose?
3. Which parameters do de-adjectival nouns display?
4. Are there any missing values for a given parameter? For instance, de-adjectival nouns can be only singular or definite or restricted to the subject position.
5. Are de-adjectival nouns found in both semantic types of nominalization? For instance, I have observed that European languages focus on the nominalisation of the adjective itself, while argument nominalizations are scarcely attested, limited to certain language varieties and not stable in the lexicon.

(needless to say, questions 2 to 4 can have multiple answers, helping to describe different patterns of property nominalisation)

Thanks in advance for your help, all the best.

Luigi

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PhD Program in Linguistics ('Scienze Linguistiche')
University of Bergamo and University of Pavia - Italy

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David Gil

Department of Linguistic and Cultural Evolution
Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History
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PhD Program in Linguistics ('Scienze Linguistiche')
University of Bergamo and University of Pavia - Italy

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David Gil

Department of Linguistic and Cultural Evolution
Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History
Kahlaische Strasse 10, 07745 Jena, Germany

Email: gil at shh.mpg.de<mailto:gil at shh.mpg.de>
Office Phone (Germany): +49-3641686834
Mobile Phone (Indonesia): +62-82238009215

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