English Nouns: The Ecology of Nominalization

Rochelle Lieber

sept 2016 · Cambridge Studies in Linguistics Libro 150 · Cambridge University Press

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Using extensive data from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (Davies, 2008), this groundbreaking book shows that the syntactic patterns in which English nominalizations can be found and the range of possible readings they can express are very different from what has been claimed in past theoretical treatments, and therefore that previous treatments cannot be correct. Lieber argues that the relationship between form and meaning in the nominalization processes of English is virtually never one-to-one, but rather forms a complex web that can be likened to a derivational ecosystem. Using the Lexical Semantic Framework (LSF), she develops an analysis that captures the interrelatedness and context dependence of nominal readings, and suggests that the key to the behavior of nominalizations is that their underlying semantic representations are underspecified in specific ways and that their ultimate interpretation must be fixed in context using processes available within the LSF.

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Rochelle Lieber is Professor of Linguistics at the University of New Hampshire, where she teaches a wide range of courses on theoretical linguistics and the English language. She is the recipient of the Carpenter Professorship (2016) and the Lindberg Award for Outstanding Teacher and Scholar in Liberal Arts (2013) from the University of New Hampshire, and the Bloomfield Award given by the Linguistic Society of America for the Oxford Reference Guide to English Morphology (with Laurie Bauer and Ingo Plag, 2015). She is the author of four previous monographs and over fifty articles and book chapters on morphology and related topics, and is the co-editor of three handbooks on morphology.