I am interested in morpho-syntax and lexical-semantics and I conduct research on several phenomena in these domains from a theoretical and psycholinguistic perspective. My research has targeted deverbal nominalization, parasynthesis, root compounding and full reduplication, combining theoretical and comparative approaches (besides Romance, Germanic and Slavic, I worked on Mandarin Chinese, Bantu and Kwa languages). I have explored the role of morphological competence and further linguistic skills across typical and atypical (dyslexic), monolingual and bilingual child populations. I have also explored the lexicon/syntax interface, modeling polysemy in Generative Lexicon theory and analyzing cognate object constructions across languages.
O. Souleimanova (a cura di), Proceedings of the 40th Linguistics Colloquium, Frankfurt: Peter Lang Publishers
The volume contains 41 papers read at the 40th Linguistics Colloquium, In their papers the contri... more The volume contains 41 papers read at the 40th Linguistics Colloquium, In their papers the contributors, linguists from many European and several non- European countries, deal with topics from grammar, semantics, pragmatics and applied linguistics
This is a survey article on neoclassical word formation, which is the creation of new lexemes wit... more This is a survey article on neoclassical word formation, which is the creation of new lexemes with Ancient Greek or Latin elements. Neoclassical word formation does not only combine formatives of classical origin (e.g. hydrophobic) but may also involve native words (e.g. hydrofoil, webology). Despite being borrowings from the classical languages, neoclassical formatives (e.g. hydr- ,-(o)logy, etc.) are productively deployed across modern European languages for the formation of new words, returning a shared vocabulary stock composed of so-called 'internationalisms'. They typically occur in technical and scientific registers, but many are words of common use (e.g. homicide, thermometer, telephone, philosophy, etc.). Since it combines stems with a lexemic value, neoclassical word formation is usually identified as a type of compounding, with exogenous properties that may differ radically from native compounds. Moreover, several other phenomena like shortening, clipping, blends and forms of derivation are attested in languages, like English, where neoclassical word formation is productive.
Combining adjective meaning with the modified noun is particularly challenging for children under... more Combining adjective meaning with the modified noun is particularly challenging for children under three years. Previous research suggests that in processing noun-adjective phrases children may over-rely on noun information, delaying or omitting adjective interpretation. However, the question of whether this difficulty is modulated by semantic differences among (subsective) adjectives is underinvestigated. A visual-world experiment explores how Italian-learning children (N=38, 2;4-5;3) process noun-adjective phrases and whether their processing strategies adapt based on the adjective class. Our investigation substantiates the proficient integration of noun and adjective semantics by children. Nevertheless, alligning with previous research, a notable asymmetry is evident in the interpretation of nouns and adjectives, the latter being integrated more slowly. Remarkably, by testing toddlers across a wide age range, we observe a developmental trajectory in processing, supporting a continuity approach to children's development. Moreover, we reveal that children exhibit sensitivity to the distinct interpretations associated with each subsective adjective.
In this paper we bring evidence from English and Italian deverbal zero nominals (to climb > th... more In this paper we bring evidence from English and Italian deverbal zero nominals (to climb > the climb-Ø N ) that zero is a possible spell-out of a nominalizer otherwise overtly instantiated in suffixed nominals (examin-ation ). We argue in favor of a Distributed Morphology approach, a separationist theory that recognizes and easily implements zero morphology with underlying syntax-semantics. Abstracting away from other theoretical trends and their foundational reasons to refrain from using zero suffixes, we address three properties that have been argued to fundamentally distinguish zero nominals from overtly suffixed nominals, with the implication that they instantiate a different word formation process: i) realization of verbal argument structure, ii) possibility of embedding verbalizing suffixes, and iii) semantic transparency in relation to the verb. By means of corpus data and two manually collected datasets of 561 English and 174 Italian zero nominals based on lexicographic ...
ABSTRACT Italian relative clauses like Il bambino che bacia la mamma ‘the child that kisses the m... more ABSTRACT Italian relative clauses like Il bambino che bacia la mamma ‘the child that kisses the mom’ are ambiguous between a subject reading and an object reading with postverbal subject. However, the latter is scarcely accessible for word order and theory-internal considerations. This study aims at investigating the role of semantic (im)plausibility in processing these ambiguous constructions. Italian children’s (7;01–10;00 years old) and adults’ (21;08–31;02 y.o.) comprehension is tested through a picture selection task. The test sentences contain lexical verbs whose interpretation can be modulated by encyclopedic knowledge (e.g., to spoon-feed). In the ambiguous sentence Il bambino che imbocca la mamma ‘the child that spoon-feeds the mom,’ the object reading is more plausible: Moms rather than children are expected agents of the spoon-feeding. Nonetheless, word order and morphosyntactic and prosodic cues prompt the subject interpretation. Results indicate that semantic plausibility cues alone are not robust enough to discard the subject reading. However, adults are sensitive to these cues, which can modulate their comprehension of ambiguous relatives. Conversely, children are unable to exploit encyclopedic knowledge in sentence processing. This can be explained with children’s reluctance to integrate contextual and encyclopedic semantic cues during processing, and with their limited processing resources, which could constrain their capacity of sentence reanalysis.
In this paper we offer an overview of the linguistic phenomena that have traditionally been handl... more In this paper we offer an overview of the linguistic phenomena that have traditionally been handled by means of zero affixes and of the theoretical debate around the advantages and disadvantages of employing such null morphemes in theoretical modeling. While the advantage of positing zero affixes is straightforward from an empirical perspective (see inflectional syncretism and affixless category change, among others), their theoretical legitimacy has been controversially debated for several decades. In this overview, we present the main problems that have been brought forward against zero affixation and some of the mechanisms that have been proposed as an alternative. Finally, we show how the different articles in our edited collection contribute to this debate by addressing the following three research questions: (1) How do current theories of derivational morphology deal with linguistic phenomena that seem to involve zero affixes? (2) How do zero derivational affixes compare with ...
Although phonological deficits are unanimously recognized as one of the key manifestations of dev... more Although phonological deficits are unanimously recognized as one of the key manifestations of developmental dyslexia, a growing body of research has reported impairments in morphological abilities. Our study aimed at casting further light on this domain by investigating the morphological awareness skills of 21 children with dyslexia (mean age 9.10 years old) and 24 children with typical development (mean age 10.3 years old). All children were monolingual speakers of Italian, which is a morphologically rich language characterized by complex inflectional and derivational paradigms. We developed an experimental protocol inspired by Berko’s Wug test and composed of 11 tasks addressing inflectional and derivational processes. Participants were asked to manipulate nonwords of various lexical categories, modeled after the phonotactic structure of Italian, and manipulation involved both word formation and base retrieval. Conditions of the experiments were based on verb conjugation classes differing in frequency, productivity, regularity, and formal transparency. Results confirmed that morphological skills are impaired in dyslexic children, who performed significantly more poorly than their age-matched peers in all tasks. Children with dyslexia were especially challenged by tasks and conditions requiring advanced morphological awareness skills, such as the retrieval of infinitives of infrequent and irregular conjugation classes. The educational and clinical implications of these findings are discussed.
In this study, we present the results of an original experimental protocol designed to assess the... more In this study, we present the results of an original experimental protocol designed to assess the performance in a pluralization task of 52 Italian children divided into two groups: 24 children with developmental dyslexia (mean age 10.0 years old) and 28 typically developing children (mean age 9.11 years old). Our task, inspired by Berko's Wug Test, had the aim of testing the subjects' ability to apply pluralization rules to nonwords in the morphologically complex context of Italian nominal inflection. Results demonstrate that dyslexics display poorer morphological skills in comparison to controls, showing lower accuracy in the task. Furthermore, the dissimilar performances reported by the subjects in the different conditions indicate that the ability to inflect nonwords depends on factors such as the rule's productivity, frequency, and opacity with respect to gender. Finally, the children's performance in this task was significantly related to their reading proficie...
The acquisition of negation in Child Italian has not yet been comprehensively addressed in the li... more The acquisition of negation in Child Italian has not yet been comprehensively addressed in the literature. This paper aims to provide a fine-grained picture of the acquisition process in this Romance language by considering production data and exploring three specific aspects of negation development: (a) the emergence and subsequent development of negators and negative constructions, (b) the acquisition of negative functions and their varying proportion of use and (c) the emergence of negative concord constructions. Using the CHILDES database, the longitudinal data of four monolingual Italian children for an observation period from 1;07 to 3;04 years of age were extracted, and the negative utterances attested in their speech production were analyzed for both the single- and the multiword utterance period. Results show a consistent and progressive form–function development of negation, mainly in line with previous cross-linguistic literature but with some language-related features. M...
Phonological awareness is a complex and multifaceted skill which plays an essential role in the d... more Phonological awareness is a complex and multifaceted skill which plays an essential role in the development of an individual’s language and literacy abilities. Phonological skills are indeed dramatically impaired in people with dyslexia, at any age and across languages, whereas their development in bilinguals is less clear. In addition, the interaction between bilingualism and dyslexia in this domain is still under-investigated. The aim of this paper is to provide new experimental evidence on this topic by exploring the phonological competence in Italian of monolingual and bilingual children with and without dyslexia. To this purpose, we developed three tasks, assessing nonword repetition, rhyme detection and spoonerisms, which we administered to 148 10-year-old children in two distinct studies. In Study 1, we found that two groups of L2 Italian typically developing bilinguals, having either Arabic or Romanian as L1, performed similarly to Italian monolinguals in all measures, point...
The goal of this paper is to provide an annotation scheme for compounds based on generative lexic... more The goal of this paper is to provide an annotation scheme for compounds based on generative lexicon theory (GL, Pustejovsky, 1995; Bassac and Bouillon, 2001). This scheme has been tested on a set of compounds automatically extracted from the Europarl corpus (Koehn, 2005) both in Italian and French. The motivation is twofold. On the one hand, it should help refine existing compound classifications and better explain lexicalization in both languages. On the other hand, we hope that the extracted generalizations can be used in NLP, for example for improving MT systems or for query reformulation (Claveau, 2003). In this paper, we focus on the annotation scheme and its on going evaluation.
Mandarin verbal reduplication is generally regarded as a phenomenon conveying an aspectual value ... more Mandarin verbal reduplication is generally regarded as a phenomenon conveying an aspectual value since it temporally bounds the event expressed by the base verb, thus resulting in a (counter-iconic) ‘diminishing’ semantics. In this paper, we put forward a novel syntactic account of diminishing reduplication in Mandarin, which derives the aspectual semantic properties of these constructs from the syntax of their event structure. In particular, we outline an analysis of reduplication as the spell out of two copies of the same lexical item, whereby the reduplicant is the lower copy sitting as the complement of the verbal head (higher copy), and displaying the distributional and interpretive properties of ‘weak’ verbal classifiers. Focusing on the status of the reduplicant, we present distributional, interpretive and diachronic evidence in support of our analysis
This contribution deals with semantically ambiguous event/result nominalisations and is aimed at ... more This contribution deals with semantically ambiguous event/result nominalisations and is aimed at showing and explaining why only certain classes of base verbs yield the relevant semantic ambiguity in their derived nominals, while other classes only give unambiguous event nominals. In particular, the focus of the investigation is on the lexical semantic characterisation of the base verbs and, more specifically, on the identification of those structural and conceptual semantic properties that are indispensable for yielding a result nominal. We accordingly propose a verbal taxonomy crucially based on the ontological concept of 'result', and formally represent the nominalisation process by means of the theoretical apparatus proposed by Lieber (2004). Specifically, we contend that the morpho-syntactic and semantic properties of result nominals can be derived through an accurate lexical decomposition of the base verbs and of the suffixes, and by implementing the co-indexation mech...
It is commonly acknowledged that deverbal action nominals are semantically ambiguous: among the m... more It is commonly acknowledged that deverbal action nominals are semantically ambiguous: among the many interpretations they can express (event, state, manner, location, etc.), the semantic distinction between Event (E) and Result (R) readings has been particularly emphasized because of its challenging syntactic corollaries (cf. Grimshaw 1990). Although this ambiguity has been subject to massive study and lively debates in the last two decades, several research questions are still in need of satisfying explanatory analyses, concerning both the formation and interpretation of E/R nominals. The main aim of the present research is to provide a principled answer to one of these fundamental questions, which has been largely neglected in the literature on the topic: 1) Why does the E interpretation seem to be the default one, while the R reading is not always available (e.g. abandonment, administration)? Trying to answer this question, however, also implies addressing an even more crucial is...
This paper deals with the event/result meaning contrast displayed by most deverbal Action Nominal... more This paper deals with the event/result meaning contrast displayed by most deverbal Action Nominals (AN). We claim that this intriguing pattern of inherent polysemy is peculiar when compared with standard cases of dot objects because the result sense is temporally and causally depended on the event sense. We attempt a formal modelling of the lexical representation of nominals derived from creation and redescription verbs (e.g. construction, translation) based on this insight, inclusive of Event Structure and Qualia Structure representations significantly different from the proposal in Pustejovsky (1995). Finally, we argue that troubles with co-predication are the direct indication of the internal asymmetry between the types that make up the complex, and can be explained in relation to different syntactic and semantic requirements of the event and result types. 1 Credits 1
O. Souleimanova (a cura di), Proceedings of the 40th Linguistics Colloquium, Frankfurt: Peter Lang Publishers
The volume contains 41 papers read at the 40th Linguistics Colloquium, In their papers the contri... more The volume contains 41 papers read at the 40th Linguistics Colloquium, In their papers the contributors, linguists from many European and several non- European countries, deal with topics from grammar, semantics, pragmatics and applied linguistics
This is a survey article on neoclassical word formation, which is the creation of new lexemes wit... more This is a survey article on neoclassical word formation, which is the creation of new lexemes with Ancient Greek or Latin elements. Neoclassical word formation does not only combine formatives of classical origin (e.g. hydrophobic) but may also involve native words (e.g. hydrofoil, webology). Despite being borrowings from the classical languages, neoclassical formatives (e.g. hydr- ,-(o)logy, etc.) are productively deployed across modern European languages for the formation of new words, returning a shared vocabulary stock composed of so-called 'internationalisms'. They typically occur in technical and scientific registers, but many are words of common use (e.g. homicide, thermometer, telephone, philosophy, etc.). Since it combines stems with a lexemic value, neoclassical word formation is usually identified as a type of compounding, with exogenous properties that may differ radically from native compounds. Moreover, several other phenomena like shortening, clipping, blends and forms of derivation are attested in languages, like English, where neoclassical word formation is productive.
Combining adjective meaning with the modified noun is particularly challenging for children under... more Combining adjective meaning with the modified noun is particularly challenging for children under three years. Previous research suggests that in processing noun-adjective phrases children may over-rely on noun information, delaying or omitting adjective interpretation. However, the question of whether this difficulty is modulated by semantic differences among (subsective) adjectives is underinvestigated. A visual-world experiment explores how Italian-learning children (N=38, 2;4-5;3) process noun-adjective phrases and whether their processing strategies adapt based on the adjective class. Our investigation substantiates the proficient integration of noun and adjective semantics by children. Nevertheless, alligning with previous research, a notable asymmetry is evident in the interpretation of nouns and adjectives, the latter being integrated more slowly. Remarkably, by testing toddlers across a wide age range, we observe a developmental trajectory in processing, supporting a continuity approach to children's development. Moreover, we reveal that children exhibit sensitivity to the distinct interpretations associated with each subsective adjective.
In this paper we bring evidence from English and Italian deverbal zero nominals (to climb > th... more In this paper we bring evidence from English and Italian deverbal zero nominals (to climb > the climb-Ø N ) that zero is a possible spell-out of a nominalizer otherwise overtly instantiated in suffixed nominals (examin-ation ). We argue in favor of a Distributed Morphology approach, a separationist theory that recognizes and easily implements zero morphology with underlying syntax-semantics. Abstracting away from other theoretical trends and their foundational reasons to refrain from using zero suffixes, we address three properties that have been argued to fundamentally distinguish zero nominals from overtly suffixed nominals, with the implication that they instantiate a different word formation process: i) realization of verbal argument structure, ii) possibility of embedding verbalizing suffixes, and iii) semantic transparency in relation to the verb. By means of corpus data and two manually collected datasets of 561 English and 174 Italian zero nominals based on lexicographic ...
ABSTRACT Italian relative clauses like Il bambino che bacia la mamma ‘the child that kisses the m... more ABSTRACT Italian relative clauses like Il bambino che bacia la mamma ‘the child that kisses the mom’ are ambiguous between a subject reading and an object reading with postverbal subject. However, the latter is scarcely accessible for word order and theory-internal considerations. This study aims at investigating the role of semantic (im)plausibility in processing these ambiguous constructions. Italian children’s (7;01–10;00 years old) and adults’ (21;08–31;02 y.o.) comprehension is tested through a picture selection task. The test sentences contain lexical verbs whose interpretation can be modulated by encyclopedic knowledge (e.g., to spoon-feed). In the ambiguous sentence Il bambino che imbocca la mamma ‘the child that spoon-feeds the mom,’ the object reading is more plausible: Moms rather than children are expected agents of the spoon-feeding. Nonetheless, word order and morphosyntactic and prosodic cues prompt the subject interpretation. Results indicate that semantic plausibility cues alone are not robust enough to discard the subject reading. However, adults are sensitive to these cues, which can modulate their comprehension of ambiguous relatives. Conversely, children are unable to exploit encyclopedic knowledge in sentence processing. This can be explained with children’s reluctance to integrate contextual and encyclopedic semantic cues during processing, and with their limited processing resources, which could constrain their capacity of sentence reanalysis.
In this paper we offer an overview of the linguistic phenomena that have traditionally been handl... more In this paper we offer an overview of the linguistic phenomena that have traditionally been handled by means of zero affixes and of the theoretical debate around the advantages and disadvantages of employing such null morphemes in theoretical modeling. While the advantage of positing zero affixes is straightforward from an empirical perspective (see inflectional syncretism and affixless category change, among others), their theoretical legitimacy has been controversially debated for several decades. In this overview, we present the main problems that have been brought forward against zero affixation and some of the mechanisms that have been proposed as an alternative. Finally, we show how the different articles in our edited collection contribute to this debate by addressing the following three research questions: (1) How do current theories of derivational morphology deal with linguistic phenomena that seem to involve zero affixes? (2) How do zero derivational affixes compare with ...
Although phonological deficits are unanimously recognized as one of the key manifestations of dev... more Although phonological deficits are unanimously recognized as one of the key manifestations of developmental dyslexia, a growing body of research has reported impairments in morphological abilities. Our study aimed at casting further light on this domain by investigating the morphological awareness skills of 21 children with dyslexia (mean age 9.10 years old) and 24 children with typical development (mean age 10.3 years old). All children were monolingual speakers of Italian, which is a morphologically rich language characterized by complex inflectional and derivational paradigms. We developed an experimental protocol inspired by Berko’s Wug test and composed of 11 tasks addressing inflectional and derivational processes. Participants were asked to manipulate nonwords of various lexical categories, modeled after the phonotactic structure of Italian, and manipulation involved both word formation and base retrieval. Conditions of the experiments were based on verb conjugation classes differing in frequency, productivity, regularity, and formal transparency. Results confirmed that morphological skills are impaired in dyslexic children, who performed significantly more poorly than their age-matched peers in all tasks. Children with dyslexia were especially challenged by tasks and conditions requiring advanced morphological awareness skills, such as the retrieval of infinitives of infrequent and irregular conjugation classes. The educational and clinical implications of these findings are discussed.
In this study, we present the results of an original experimental protocol designed to assess the... more In this study, we present the results of an original experimental protocol designed to assess the performance in a pluralization task of 52 Italian children divided into two groups: 24 children with developmental dyslexia (mean age 10.0 years old) and 28 typically developing children (mean age 9.11 years old). Our task, inspired by Berko's Wug Test, had the aim of testing the subjects' ability to apply pluralization rules to nonwords in the morphologically complex context of Italian nominal inflection. Results demonstrate that dyslexics display poorer morphological skills in comparison to controls, showing lower accuracy in the task. Furthermore, the dissimilar performances reported by the subjects in the different conditions indicate that the ability to inflect nonwords depends on factors such as the rule's productivity, frequency, and opacity with respect to gender. Finally, the children's performance in this task was significantly related to their reading proficie...
The acquisition of negation in Child Italian has not yet been comprehensively addressed in the li... more The acquisition of negation in Child Italian has not yet been comprehensively addressed in the literature. This paper aims to provide a fine-grained picture of the acquisition process in this Romance language by considering production data and exploring three specific aspects of negation development: (a) the emergence and subsequent development of negators and negative constructions, (b) the acquisition of negative functions and their varying proportion of use and (c) the emergence of negative concord constructions. Using the CHILDES database, the longitudinal data of four monolingual Italian children for an observation period from 1;07 to 3;04 years of age were extracted, and the negative utterances attested in their speech production were analyzed for both the single- and the multiword utterance period. Results show a consistent and progressive form–function development of negation, mainly in line with previous cross-linguistic literature but with some language-related features. M...
Phonological awareness is a complex and multifaceted skill which plays an essential role in the d... more Phonological awareness is a complex and multifaceted skill which plays an essential role in the development of an individual’s language and literacy abilities. Phonological skills are indeed dramatically impaired in people with dyslexia, at any age and across languages, whereas their development in bilinguals is less clear. In addition, the interaction between bilingualism and dyslexia in this domain is still under-investigated. The aim of this paper is to provide new experimental evidence on this topic by exploring the phonological competence in Italian of monolingual and bilingual children with and without dyslexia. To this purpose, we developed three tasks, assessing nonword repetition, rhyme detection and spoonerisms, which we administered to 148 10-year-old children in two distinct studies. In Study 1, we found that two groups of L2 Italian typically developing bilinguals, having either Arabic or Romanian as L1, performed similarly to Italian monolinguals in all measures, point...
The goal of this paper is to provide an annotation scheme for compounds based on generative lexic... more The goal of this paper is to provide an annotation scheme for compounds based on generative lexicon theory (GL, Pustejovsky, 1995; Bassac and Bouillon, 2001). This scheme has been tested on a set of compounds automatically extracted from the Europarl corpus (Koehn, 2005) both in Italian and French. The motivation is twofold. On the one hand, it should help refine existing compound classifications and better explain lexicalization in both languages. On the other hand, we hope that the extracted generalizations can be used in NLP, for example for improving MT systems or for query reformulation (Claveau, 2003). In this paper, we focus on the annotation scheme and its on going evaluation.
Mandarin verbal reduplication is generally regarded as a phenomenon conveying an aspectual value ... more Mandarin verbal reduplication is generally regarded as a phenomenon conveying an aspectual value since it temporally bounds the event expressed by the base verb, thus resulting in a (counter-iconic) ‘diminishing’ semantics. In this paper, we put forward a novel syntactic account of diminishing reduplication in Mandarin, which derives the aspectual semantic properties of these constructs from the syntax of their event structure. In particular, we outline an analysis of reduplication as the spell out of two copies of the same lexical item, whereby the reduplicant is the lower copy sitting as the complement of the verbal head (higher copy), and displaying the distributional and interpretive properties of ‘weak’ verbal classifiers. Focusing on the status of the reduplicant, we present distributional, interpretive and diachronic evidence in support of our analysis
This contribution deals with semantically ambiguous event/result nominalisations and is aimed at ... more This contribution deals with semantically ambiguous event/result nominalisations and is aimed at showing and explaining why only certain classes of base verbs yield the relevant semantic ambiguity in their derived nominals, while other classes only give unambiguous event nominals. In particular, the focus of the investigation is on the lexical semantic characterisation of the base verbs and, more specifically, on the identification of those structural and conceptual semantic properties that are indispensable for yielding a result nominal. We accordingly propose a verbal taxonomy crucially based on the ontological concept of 'result', and formally represent the nominalisation process by means of the theoretical apparatus proposed by Lieber (2004). Specifically, we contend that the morpho-syntactic and semantic properties of result nominals can be derived through an accurate lexical decomposition of the base verbs and of the suffixes, and by implementing the co-indexation mech...
It is commonly acknowledged that deverbal action nominals are semantically ambiguous: among the m... more It is commonly acknowledged that deverbal action nominals are semantically ambiguous: among the many interpretations they can express (event, state, manner, location, etc.), the semantic distinction between Event (E) and Result (R) readings has been particularly emphasized because of its challenging syntactic corollaries (cf. Grimshaw 1990). Although this ambiguity has been subject to massive study and lively debates in the last two decades, several research questions are still in need of satisfying explanatory analyses, concerning both the formation and interpretation of E/R nominals. The main aim of the present research is to provide a principled answer to one of these fundamental questions, which has been largely neglected in the literature on the topic: 1) Why does the E interpretation seem to be the default one, while the R reading is not always available (e.g. abandonment, administration)? Trying to answer this question, however, also implies addressing an even more crucial is...
This paper deals with the event/result meaning contrast displayed by most deverbal Action Nominal... more This paper deals with the event/result meaning contrast displayed by most deverbal Action Nominals (AN). We claim that this intriguing pattern of inherent polysemy is peculiar when compared with standard cases of dot objects because the result sense is temporally and causally depended on the event sense. We attempt a formal modelling of the lexical representation of nominals derived from creation and redescription verbs (e.g. construction, translation) based on this insight, inclusive of Event Structure and Qualia Structure representations significantly different from the proposal in Pustejovsky (1995). Finally, we argue that troubles with co-predication are the direct indication of the internal asymmetry between the types that make up the complex, and can be explained in relation to different syntactic and semantic requirements of the event and result types. 1 Credits 1
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