Growth and Improvement: A Quality Semantics for Result State Nominals

The syntactic and argument structural properties of nominalizations have been explored in great detail (Lees 1960; Chomsky 1970; Grimshaw 1990, inter alia). However, though propositional and eventive readings of deverbal nominalizations have been extensively studied (Zucchi 1993; Grimm & McNally 2015), less attention has been paid to the detailed semantics of nominals encoding change of state. In this talk, I argue that a subset of these nominals, such as growth, improvement, and expansion, which I refer to as result state nominals, possess properties that distinguish them from other eventive nominals. These properties group result state nominals with quality nouns referring to property concepts, such as courage, beauty, and strength (Tovena 2001; Francez & Koontz-Garboden 2017). I develop an analysis of result state nominals on which their stative component is modeled as a portion of an abstract quality (Francez & Koontz-Garboden 2017), derived as the mereological remainder of the portion of quality possessed at the end of an event and the portion possessed at the beginning of the event. Result state nominals inherit the parthood and size orderings defined on the qualities from which they are derived, explaining the properties they share with quality nouns. More broadly, the analysis gives rise to a quality-based semantics for change of state, with applications beyond the domain of result state nominals, and leads to more general research questions about the derivation of change of state predicates cross-linguistically.