In one popular view, expressed most fully in Borer 2005, word meanings are nothing but unstructured, polysemous ‘blobs’ of content, with no formal properties. It is the syntactic context that shapes their meaning, and only this functional scaffolding delivers the kinds of meanings that the compositional semantics trades in. I call this the ‘Blob Theory’ of root meanings. I am going to argue against the Blob Theory by investigating an overlooked class of nominalizations that show properties unexpected under most classifications (Grimshaw 1990, and following): they exhibit some properties of event nominals (they can be modified by frequent/constant, cf. Borer 2003, Alexiadou 2009) but they nonetheless do not have argument structure. I provide an account of these nominalizations as eventive root nominalizations. I then examine the behaviour of these nominalizations with respect to clausal arguments. I argue that their ability to combine with clausal complements shows that roots have a structured semantics that interacts, as unexpected by Blob Theory, with the compositional semantics.
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Cited by (12)
Cited by 12 other publications
Angelopoulos, Nikos
2024. Nominalization of clauses: The clausal prolepsis strategy. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory
Srinivas, Sadhwi & Géraldine Legendre
2024. Does D Select the CP in Light Verb Constructions? A Reply to Hankamer and Mikkelsen 2021. Linguistic Inquiry 55:3 ► pp. 595 ff.
Borer, Hagit
2023. Argument Structure and Derived Nominals. In The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Morphology, ► pp. 1 ff.
Uegaki, Wataru
2022. Thinking About: Clausal Complements as Predicates?. In Question-orientedness and the Semantics of Clausal Complementation [Studies in Linguistics and Philosophy, 106], ► pp. 161 ff.
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