Buy a Relation, Get the Role Half Off: Instantiating Event Representations for Novel Denominal Verbs

An important ability of our linguistic and conceptual system is the production and comprehension of novel referring expressions. A very common form of novel referring expressions is the novel use of a noun as a verb, i.e. a novel denominal verb. Clark and Clark (1970) analyze the range of potential meanings for novel denominal verbs, but do not conduct any empirical investigations into the nature of the representations instantiated by interpreting these novel verbs. This is the goal of the current study. The conceptual representations underlying nouns and verbs differ formally. Typically, the nouns that get turned into verbs refer to objects, e.g. Paula hairpinned the lock open. These objects can be represented by unstructured feature sets. On the other hand, verbs refer to events, which are defined by relations among objects (Gentner 1981). We aim to show the consequences of transforming a feature-based object representation into a relational event representation. While many nouns refer to feature-based object concepts, many refer to the roles participants play in events, e.g. thief is the agent of stealing events (Markman and Stilwell 2001). Typical agents are activated as part of the representations of verbs (Ferretti, McRae & Hatherall 2001). A potential result of interpreting novel denominal verbs is the creation a novel agent concept. This study demonstrates this result by showing the reduced processing time of subsequent novel agent terms, e.g. the hairpinner