From psych verbs to nouns

Abstract

The Aspect Preservation Hypothesis (APH) predicts that, all things being equal, the aspectual information of a deverbal nominalization reflects the Aktionsart of the verbal base. This hypothesis faces prima facie counterexamples in the domain of psychological nouns, as they quite systematically denote states, while not all psychological verbs are stative. This chapter addresses these counterexamples and argues that they do not pose a problem for the APH. We argue that the base of the nominalization is a partially specified verbal stem; then we show that only verbs whose stem is stative have a derived psychological noun. Verbs whose stem is not stative lack a corresponding nominalization, although they can be associated with an underived psychological noun.