Publication details
Zum valenztheoretischen Status von Begleitern in Nominalgruppen
| Title in English | On the status of dependents of nominals in Valency Theory |
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| Authors | |
| Year of publication | 2012 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Description | The question if there is a nominal valency „sui generis“ (Teubert 2003) has not yet received a final answer. The main reason is that only one of the relations widely seen as constitutive for valency dependencies (cf. Jacobs 1994) holds between a nominal governor and its dependents. Usually, there is no surface constraint to realise dependents of nominals, nor are the prototypical dependents of nominals formally specified for the kind of relation they form with their governors. We are left, then, with just the semantic relation between dependent and governor, which, however, is more of a logical than of a linguistic nature. The aim of the presentation is to suggest a further criterion for valency dependencies based on Ágel’s (1995) adaptation of the concept “structural case” (Chomsky 1981) for valency theory. Following Eroms (1980; 2007), I regard nominals prefixed with Be- as converse constructions of analogue nominals without a prefix. This premise granted, it becomes possible to define a new valency relation in the nominal domain, which Ágel (for the verbal domain) calls “structural specificity”. A dependent of a nominal is “structural specific” to this nominal, if there is a regular alternation of its formal properties depending on the presence or the absence of the prefix. In the empirical part of the presentation, I present a detail analyse of the morphosyntactic environment of several selected pairs of nominals with and without the prefix Be-. |