The argumental structure and polysemy in nominalizations

Abstract

This paper analyzes deverbal nominalizations in Brazilian Portuguese (BP), focusing the relationship between the polysemy present in these items and their syntactic structure. The theoretical basis of this study is the Exoskeletal Model (BORER, H. 2005a, 2005b, 2013a), a theoretical approach to Generative Grammar that analyzes word formation from a derivational point of view. That is, words are formed by the computational system and present internal syntactic structure, as well as phrases and sentences. The research methodology is the formal study of the syntactic-semantic behavior of the deverbal nominalizations, having as object of analysis nominals formed by the suffixes –ção and -mento in BP. The analyzed data were selected from Google and from the corpora corpus of the Portuguese NOW and Brazilian corpus. In some cases, introspection was also used. The hypothesis of this research is that the functional layers in the syntactic structure of the deverbal nominals directly influence its reading, according to the different constructionist proposals of the Generative Grammar. The results of the analyzes demonstrate that the event reading in these nominals results from the inheritance of the event structure of its verbal counterpart, having in its internal structure all the event-forming functional layers. Nouns with result reading, in turn, present only the aspectual and verbal layers in their structure. In nominals with entity reading, the nominalizer is projected above the root and typifies it as a verb. In this way, the root gains a verbal status, but it does not present an argument structure.