Polysemy in word formation: the case of deverbal nominals

In this research, I survey a significant pattern of deverbal word-formation in Italian, and integrate the data analysis into a recently developed theoretical model of derivational semantics. In particular, the main goal of this study is to analyze the range of semantic interpretations and the corresponding morpho-syntactic behavior displayed by the class of deverbal nouns usually acknowledged as "action nominals". While Chapter 2 contains an overview of the relevant literature on the subject in the generative tradition, the body of the dissertation is composed of Chapters 3 to 5, where I work out a theoretical proposal aimed at accounting for the lexical meaning of a range of deverbal nominals in a framework of decompositional lexical semantics. Specifically, this research, which is placed against the theoretical background of generative morphology, rests on groundwork laid in recent years by Lieber and Baayen (1997; 1999) and Lieber (2003), and in the more elaborated version of Lieber (2004). The present chapter introduces the reader to the phenomenon of nominalization, offers an overview of the subject to be discussed and of the theoretical background, and finally sketches out the thesis outline.