The Semantics of English Nominalizations: How Much Is Usage?

In this chapter, I consider the semantics of English action and agentive nominalizations. I consider the question of how much of the meaning of a nominalization can be considered a matter of linguistics, as opposed to a matter of lexical usage. Even if the variation in the meanings of nominalizations is taken to be accounted for in terms of metonymy, as has been suggested by some researchers within cognitive linguistics, there is still a great deal that we know about words (or what the words denote) which cannot be explained by linguistic structure. This is illustrated with specific examples. Institutionalization and lexicalization (Bauer, English Word-Formation. Cambridge University Press, 1983) give rise to increasing amounts of such information, so that the proportion of information we hold about a word’s meaning is not constant, but changing, until eventually such words can be treated as if they were not morphologically complex. Semantic structure may not reflect morphological structure. What is argued here for nominalizations must also be true for all word-formation processes.