This paper addresses a fundamental problem of derivational morphology: which meanings are possible for the words of a given morphological category, which forms can be chosen to express a given meaning, and what is the role of the base in these mappings of form and meaning? In a broad empirical study we examine the extent to which two types of nominalizations in English – conversion nouns and -ing nominalizations – can express either eventive or referential readings, can be quantified as either count or mass, and can be based on verbs of particular aspectual classes (state, activity, accomplishment, achievement, semelfactive). Past literature (for example, Grimshaw 1990 Brinton 1995, 1998 Borer 2013) has suggested an association between conversion nominalization, count quantification, and referential reading on the one hand, and between -ing nominalization, mass quantification and eventive reading on the other. Using a subset of the data reported in Andreou & Lieber (2020), we give statistical evidence that the relationship between morphological form, type of quantification, and aspectual class of base verb is neither categorical, as the literature suggests, nor completely free, but rather is probabilistic. We provide both a univariate analysis and a multivariate analysis (using conditional inference trees) that show that the relationship among the variables of morphological form, eventivity, quantification and aspectual class of base is complex. Tendencies sometimes go in the direction suggested by past literature (e.g. -ing forms tend to be eventive), but sometimes contradict past predictions (conversion also tends to be eventive). We also document that an important role is played by the specific verb underlying the nominalization rather than the aspectual class of verb. Finally, we consider what the pattern of polysemy that we uncover suggests with respect to theoretical modeling, looking at syntactic models (Distributed Morphology), lexical semantic models (the Lexical Semantic Framework), Analogical Models, and Distributional Semantics.

Recent research on the acoustic realization of affixes has revealed differences between phonologically homophonous affixes, e.g. the different kinds of final [s] and [z] in English (Plag, Homann & Kunter 2017, Zimmermann 2016a). Such results are unexpected and unaccounted for in widely accepted post-Bloomfieldian item-and-arrangement models (Hockett 1954), which separate lexical and post-lexical phonology, and in models which interpret phonetic effects as consequences of different prosodic structure. This paper demonstrates that the differences in duration of English final S as a function of the morphological function it expresses (non-morphemic, plural, third person singular, genitive, genitive plural, cliticized has, and cliticized is) can be approximated by considering the support for these morphological functions from the words’ sublexical and collocational properties. We estimated this support using naïve discriminative learning and replicated previous results for English vowels (Tucker, Sims & Baayen 2019), indicating that segment duration is lengthened under higher functional certainty but shortened under functional uncertainty. We discuss the implications of these results, obtained with a wide learning network that eschews representations for morphemes and exponents, for models in theoretical morphology as well as for models of lexical processing.

Phrasal compounds are taken to be word-level structures that combine a lexical head with a phrasal non-head. Several claims have emerged from the pertinent literature: phrasal compounds allegedly only have nominal heads, can host a variety of syntactic structures in non-head position, are determinative, and are instances of expressive morphology. The existence of adjectival phrasal compounds is either explicitly denied in the literature, or considered a marginal phenomenon at best. This article presents data from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA; Davies 2008) that show that adjectival phrasal compounds do exist in English. We demonstrate that they are similar to non-phrasal adjectival compounds and to nominal phrasal compounds. At the same time, they crucially differ from nominal compounds in the prototypical semantic relations between head and non-head: adjectival phrasal compounds are mostly similative-intensifying as opposed to determinative. We argue that this property is also found in noun–adjective compounds and follows naturally from the semantics of the head category in question, viz. adjectives as mostly gradable predicates. In turn, the majority of adjectival phrasal compounds in our data feature a strong expressive component, a characteristic they share with other phrasal compounds.