Resumen de Russian Deverbal Nouns: Lexical Denotation, Argument Structure & Translation Mismatches
María Glòria De Valdivia Pujol
This thesis presents a descriptive empirical study of deverbal nominalizations. Very often what can be expressed by means of a deverbal noun can also be expressed by means of a verbal construction and vice-versa. Deverbal nouns are hybrid categories that have a mixture of verbal and nominal features. These nouns can denote either the action named by the base verb, being, in this case, a paraphrase of a verbal construction, or the result of that action. If nouns denoting processes are closer to verbs, nouns denoting a result, that is, a concrete or an abstract entity resulting from the action, are closer to nouns. Both result and event nouns inherit the argument structure of the base verb. These analyses of the lexical denotation of deverbal nouns and their argument structure are two of the main aims of this thesis. The third goal is the descriptive and comparative study of translation mismatches between Russian and Spanish deverbal noun constructions. The thesis is structured in the following way in order to cover these three points. In the first chapter, we present a brief introduction of the whole thesis, we highlight the main goals and motivations for carrying out this threefold study. In the second chapter, we describe the linguistic resources used in the development of this project. We first introduce the monolingual and bilingual corpora, and then, the lexicons. In the third chapter, we discuss the relationship between the morphological and lexical aspects of the base verb and the lexical denotation of the deverbal noun. We also study other factors that may influence the lexical denotation of the deverbal noun. In the fourth chapter, we present the study of the argument structure of deverbal nouns focusing on the type of constituent that can be an argument, how the arguments are realized and their possible combinations, which ends in the obtention of the more freqüent syntactico-semantic patterns. In chapter five, we present the descriptive and comparative study of translation mismatches of deverbal nouns between Russian and Spanish. We provide our classification of the translation mismatches depending on the interrelation and number of linguistic changes (morphologic, syntactic, semantic and pragmatic) involved. Finally, in the last chapter we present our conclusions and ideas for further research.
