The focus of this talk is on deadjectival nominalizations
in English, and particularly on nouns derived from adjectives
via the suffix –ness. –ness is one of the most productive
suffixes in English and it derives nouns with quite
general semantics.
Despite the productivity of –ness nominalizations,
gaps exist. These are discussed, for example, in Roy
(2010). Roy reaches the conclusion that nominalizations
are possible only from adjectives that can be used predicatively.
Conversely, nominalizations are not possible with adjectives
that can only be used attributively. The gap is related
to this difference in syntactic behaviour and its modelling
relies on a syntactic account.
This would predict that nominalizations from adjectives
like utter, for example, would be impossible, as such
adjectives would typically not be allowed in predicative
use:
(1) a. This is an utter failure.
b. *This failure is utter.
This paper examines nominalizations of adjectives in
English and claims that the gaps are not as big or well-defined
as previously claimed. For example, searches through
corpora, the internet and the OED find –ness nominalizations
from adjectives like utter, e.g. utterness of failure
and utterness of her collapse are attested in the OED.
The claim of this paper is that gaps in –ness nominalizations
are better understood with reference to adjectival semantics
along the lines of the proposal in McNally and Boleda
(2004). Gaps in the derivation of –ness nouns could be
related to their distinction between adjectives that
modify kinds and adjectives that modify individuals.
References
Bauer, Laurie, Lieber, Rochelle, and Plag, Ingo. 2013.
The Oxford Reference Guide to English Morphology.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Lieber, Rochelle. 2004. Morphology and lexical semantics.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Lieber, Rochelle. 2015. The semantics of transposition.
Morphology, 25: 353-369.
McNally, L. and Boleda, G. (2004). Relational adjectives
as properties of kinds. In Bonami, O. and Cabredo Hofherr,
P., editors, Empirical Issues in Formal Syntax and
Semantics 5, pages 179-196. CSSP.
Roy, Isabelle. 2010. Deadjectival nominalizations and
the structure of the adjective. In Alexiadou, Artemis
and Rathert, Monika (eds.), The Syntax of Nominalizations
Across Languages and Frameworks, 129-158. New York:
Walter de Gruyter. |