Towards a theory of denominals in English and Romanian

Abstract

The aim of this thesis is two-fold. On the one hand, it has a descriptive purpose, as it strives to capture the differences between denominal verbs in English and Romanian from a descriptive point of view by looking at significant data: a database of English denominal verbs created by Clark & Clark (1979), a database of Romanian denominal verbs created by the author of this thesis on the basis of a bilingual dictionary (Halvorsen 2007). An essential difference is the fact that, while English denominals have the same form as the bare noun they derive from (dance-dance, butter-butter, corral-corral, hammer-hammer), Romanian denominals have a different form: while the noun has the form dans, the verb is dansa, with an additional suffix indicating the declension. Moreover, denominals are very productive in English, whereas they are not in Romanian: there is no correspondent for the verb to shelve, for instance; instead, Romanian uses the periphrastic a pune pe raft ‘to put on shelf’. On the other hand, the thesis has a theoretical purpose. It aims at clarifying the notion of denominal verb, at presenting the analyses that have been proposed as accounts of denominals in the literature (Hale & Keyser 1998, 2002, Mateu 200, 2002, Ramchand 2008 a.o.), but it also aims at putting forth a novel approach starting from the nanosyntactic framework (Starke 2001, 2009, Caha 2009, Pancheva 2011), according to which lexical items may target phrasal nodes. I have embraced Ramchand’s (2008) analysis of verbs along the tripartition InitiationP, ProcessP, resultP, together with Svenonius’s (2007) and Pantcheva’s (2011) nanosyntactic decomposition of spatial prepositions (as RouteP>SourceP>GoalP>PlaceP>N). Thus, an item such as the denominal corral (the horses), paraphrased as ‘put the horses in the corral’ may be argued to spell out InitP, ProcP, GoalP, PlaceP, N, an item such as the verb dance, paraphrased as ‘do a dance’ may be argued to spell out InitP, ProcP, N, whereas pseudoagentive verbs like spy spell out InitP, ProcP, PP, N, as also indicated by the paraphrase ‘act like a spy’. As for instrument verbs such as hammer, it may be argued they spell out InitP, ProcP, PP, N, if one thinks of a paraphrase such as ‘hit with a hammer’, or even InitP, ProcP, N, if one embraces a ‘use a hammer’ paraphrase. A similar proposal is adopted for Romanian denominals. In the various analyses I provided throughout the thesis, I sometimes tried to make use of silent items such as the silent prepositions IN, ON or the silent preposition WITH. Such silent items feed the structure with meaning which cannot be otherwise captured by the projections, given that they are not fine-grained enough. Moreover, interestingly, the lexical item lexicalizing the extremity (initP) will never be used in the actual language as a spell out of Proc or Goal or Place. Such a gap can be argued to be verb-specific. If, on the other hand, one postulates silent items, the absence of a preposition corral or a preposition hammer could be explained by the presence of a silent item IN or WITH lexicalizing the GoalP or the PP. A Phrasal Spell-Out account is a viable option for explaining the formation of denominals. However, it has its problems and limits. If one take an example such as Linda danced into the room, embacing the nanosyntax way of storing items as trees in the lexicon would lead to the conclusion that the item dance into has to be stored in the lexicon, just as all the other manner verbs in English combining with a GoalP. This would result in a burdensome lexicon, which is undesirable and can be avoided if one adopts a view where syntax exists as a module per se, distinct from the lexicon. All in all, the thesis discusses a novel approach to denominals, applying it to verbs in English and Romanian, and trying to see to what extent such an approach can capture their formation and behaviour.