INTERPRETATION OF ENGLISH DERIVED NOMINALS AND THEIR ASPECTUAL PROPERTIES

The class of English nouns which are referred to as derived nominals is not a homogenous class. Namely, derived nominals can further be classified into process and result nominals. A group of properties owing to which such a classification is currently accepted are aspectual properties the derived nominals inherit from their corresponding verbs, which are investigated in this paper. It is acknowledged in the relevant literature that the interpretation of derived nominals as result or process nominals primarily depends on their argument structure, more specifically on the presence or absence of the of-phrase complement (Grimshaw, 1990, Alexiadou, 2007). Based on the tests conducted among a group of native English speakers, the paper argues that what is relevant for the interpretation of derived nominals, in addition to the argument structure, are their aspectual properties reflected in the adverbial expressions that occur in the phrases or clauses containing the derived nominals. The tests include phrases and clauses with derived nominals ending with the suffixes al, ance, -ment, -tion, and -ure. The phrases used originate from the COCA corpus and are modified with suitable aspectual phrases, such as take a long time and be long, in an hour and for an hour, went on and on and lasted for days. Keywords: derived nominal, aspectual properties, aspectual phrase