{"pk":25752,"title":"Understanding Deverbal Nominals:\nWorld Knowledge or Lexical Semantics?","subtitle":null,"abstract":"The paper investigates how speakers understand constructions\nwith deverbal nominals, i.e. nominals such as destruction that\nare morphologically related to verbs. Specifically, given the\nexpression the enemy’s destruction, how do the speakers\ndecide whether the possessive argument is the entity that\ninitiates the action (agent) or the entity that is causally\naffected by the event (patient)? The results of an experimental\nstudy show that this choice is dependent on the lexical\nsemantics of the nominal. The theoretical implication is that\ndeverbal nominals are similar to verbs in that they have\nargument structure. By studying comprehension of deverbal\nnominals the current study extends the scope of previous\nexperimental work on lexical semantics that has been\nprimarily concerned with verbs","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"lexical semantics; argument structure; thematic\nroles; deverbal nominals."}],"section":"Papers","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0cr9b8vn","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Anastasia","middle_name":"","last_name":"Smirnova","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of Michigan","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2015-01-01T18:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/25752/galley/15376/download/"}]}