Publication details
Zum valenztheoretischen Status von Begleitern in Nominalgruppen
| Title in English | On the status of dependents inside nominal phrases from the perspective of valency theory |
|---|---|
| Authors | |
| Year of publication | 2014 |
| Type | Chapter of a book |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Description | Within valency theory, there is a debate whether one could assign a genuine valency to substantives (cf. Teubert 2003). The reason for scepticism is the fact that of all commonly assumed valency relations (cf. Jacobs 1994), only one can hold without reasonable doubt inside the nominal phrase: the predicate - argument relation. For linguists who are concerned foremost with language structure and not with logical relations, a mere logical relation does not qualify as justification for postulating a linguistic relation. In the present paper, I make an attempt to identify a further, genuine linguistic criterion to identify actants within nominal phrases, building on work by Chomsky (1981), Ágel (1995) and Eroms (1980; 2007). In more detail, I suggest classifying those nominal dependents as “actants” which show systematic formal alternations correlating with the syntactic context they appear in. As there is no passive diathesis of nominal phrases, I focus on converse constructions formed by adding the prefix Be- to a verbal noun (cf. Eroms 1980; 2007). I then study the formal alternations appearing in the context of derived nouns of this sort. |