Verbal Properties of Deverbal Nominals

Deverbal nominalisations and their syntactic and semantic properties are a widely discussed topic in linguistics. This dissertation provides an aspectual analysis of deverbal nominalisations that is situated between lexicon, syntax and morphology and brings together works from established theoretical frameworks. A compositional system for eventive noun phrases is introduced that combines the meanings of the base verb, the verbal argument(s) and the derivational suffix, thus connecting different linguistic disciplines. The interaction of event nominals with their syntactic and semantic environment is illustrated for three languages - French, German and English.The first two chapters provide a survey of current linguistic theories on nominalisations in different languages. Chapter three illustrates the special difficulties of the French nominalisation system with a quantitative and qualitative corpus analysis. Neologisms and the contexts in which they surface are discussed. The chapters four and five introduce the semantic composition system for eventive noun phrases with different classes of base verbs and different types of verbal arguments. Chapter six deals with structural borrowing from English in French and German raising the question if the aspectual properties of the foreign suffixes can be maintained in the target language. The final chapter sums up the results and provides a link to other established theories in that field.