Typology of Substantives Motivating Denominal Verbs

Abstract

The article addresses substantives, from which denominal verbs are derived. The research focuses on derivational patterns of denominal verbs. The phenomenon under analysis has been approached in a variety of comparative, contrastive, and typological studies. While most of the works deal with denominal verbs structure and semantics, the dependence of the verbs meaning on their motivating substantives’ semantics remains understudied, which makes the present research relevant. The research objective is to identify correlations between the denominal verb meaning and its motivating substantive, and to infer the verb meaning on the basis of the motivating substantive semantics. The analysis of a number of substanive lexical features such as concrete / abstract / animate / inanimate, nomination by profession, instrument, time interval, etc., enables to suggest the nature of denominal verb and the motivating substantive meaning dependence. The conclusion can be made that the meaning of denominal verbs is likely to depend on the semantics of the motivating substantives. The probabilistic nature of this dependence is due to both extralinguistic factors, which influence the choice of a nomination feature (i.e. an action associated with a motivating substantive), and linguistic causes, among which are a set of word-formation patterns, their productivity, availability of potential derivatives’ synonyms and homonyms.