Ryan Walter Smith (Rutgers University) will give an online colloquium.
You can RSVP for this Zoom talk using this link.
Growth and improvement: a quality semantics for partial change nominals
The syntactic and argument structural properties of nominalizations have been explored in great detail (Lees 1960; Chomsky 1970; Grimshaw 1990, inter alia). However, though propositional and eventive readings of deverbal nominalizations have been extensively studied (Zucchi 1993; Grimm & McNally 2015), less attention has been paid to the detailed semantics of nominals encoding change of state. In this talk, I argue that a subset of these nominals, such as growth, improvement, and expansion, which I refer to as partial change nominals, possess properties that distinguish them from other eventive nominals. These properties group partial change nominals with quality nouns referring to property concepts, such as courage, beauty, and strength (Tovena 2001; Francez & Koontz-Garboden 2017). I develop an analysis of partial change nominals on which their stative component is modeled as a portion of an abstract quality (Francez & Koontz-Garboden 2015, 2017), derived as the mereological remainder of the portion of quality possessed at the end of an event and the portion possessed at the beginning of the event (Cotnoir & Varzi 2019). Partial change nominals inherit the parthood and size orderings defined on the qualities from which they are derived, explaining the properties they share with quality nouns. More broadly, the analysis gives rise to a quality-based semantics for change of state and leads to more general research questions about the derivation of change of state predicates cross-linguistically.
References
Casati, R., & Varzi, A. C. (1999). Parts and places: The structures of spatial representation. MIT press.
Chomsky N. (1970) Remarks on Nominalization. In R. Jacobs & P. Rosenbaum, eds., Readings in English Transformational Grammar, Ginn, Waltham MA.
Cotnoir, A. J., & Varzi, A. C. (2019). Natural axioms for classical mereology. The Review of Symbolic Logic, 12(1), 201-208.
Francez, I. and Koontz-Garboden, A. (2017). Semantics and morphosyntactic variation: Qualities and the grammar of property concepts. Oxford University Press.
Grimm, S. & McNally, L. (2015). The -ing dynasty: Rebuilding the semantics of nominalizations. In Sarah D’Antonio, Mary Moroney & Carol Rose Little (eds.), SALT 25, 82–102.
Grimshaw, J. (1990). Argument structure. MIT Press.
Lees, RB. (1960). The Grammar of English Nominalizations. The Hague: Mouton.
Tovena, L. (2001). Between mass and count. In Proceedings of WCCFL, volume 20, 565–578. Cascadilla Press.
Zucchi, A. (1993). The language of propositions and events: Issues in the syntax and the semantics of nominalization. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
