Interpretational alternatives for attributive structures belonging to Hungarian deverbal nouns

Abstract

The paper discusses how different meanings can be associated with attributive structures that belong to deverbal nominals in Hungarian. The semantic ambiguity of deverbal nominals lies with their hybrid status: they are partly verbal and partly nominal. Parallel with this Janus-facedness, the semantic contribution of their attributive constructions (and that of their possessors, if any) may rely on either the ‘input’ verbal character or the ‘output’ nominal character. In our transformational (phase-theorist minimalist) generative syntactic framework, we account for the ‘verbal character’ by assuming that certain deverbal nominal constructions (e.g., the complex-event denoting subtype) have syntactic structures that factually contain (more or less “fully-fledged”) highly complex verb phrases. As for ‘nominal-based’ meaning contributions, we account for the observed ambiguity by assuming polysemous mental networks, formally represented as directed graphs.