Instrument and Means interpretation of deverbal nominals: The role of ambiguous stative verbs in French VN compounding

  • This article examines French Verb-Noun compounds with Means value (couvre-pied 'blanket', lit. cover-feet), derived from stative bases. It shows that they are generally ambiguous between Means and Instrument reading. The regularity of this double value discards an analysis relying on verbal homonymy, in favor of Rothmayr's (2009) hypothesis of bi-eventive verbs. We assume that the presence of an agentive as well as a stative component in the verbal bases accounts for the double Means/Instrument value of the VNs studied here. We also examine "pure" Instrument VNs, available with similar verbal bases. We show that the distribution of the Instrument vs. Means/Instrument values relies on the state of the referent of the noun involved in the compound after the event described by the verbal base occurred. A permanent state entails a "pure" Instrument reading, whereas Means/Instrument reading obtains if the state of N is reversible (Fábregas & Marín 2012).

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Author:Marie Laurence Knittel, Florence VilloingORCiDGND
URN:urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-705003
DOI:https://doi.org/10.3726/zwjw.2020.02.09
ISSN:2367-3877
Parent Title (Multiple languages):Zeitschrift für Wortbildung : ZWJW = Journal of word formation
Publisher:Peter Lang
Place of publication:Berlin
Document Type:Article
Language:English
Date of Publication (online):2022/10/07
Year of first Publication:2020
Publishing Institution:Universitätsbibliothek Johann Christian Senckenberg
Release Date:2023/01/11
GND Keyword:Verbalnomen; Zustandsverb
Volume:4.2020
Issue:2
Page Number:23
First Page:164
Last Page:186
HeBIS-PPN:507016122
Dewey Decimal Classification:4 Sprache / 44 Französisch, romanische Sprachen allgemein
4 Sprache / 40 Sprache / 400 Sprache
4 Sprache / 41 Linguistik / 410 Linguistik
Sammlungen:Linguistik
Linguistik-Klassifikation:Linguistik-Klassifikation: Morphologie / Morphology
Licence (German):License LogoCreative Commons - CC BY - Namensnennung 4.0 International