Old English genitive deverbal nominalisations with verbs of inaction. An RRG-based study

Resumen

This paper deals with Old English derived nouns that entail a verbal predication. Morespecifically, it aims at analysing the role of deverbal nominalisations in the genitive on asemantic and syntactic basis. Deverbal nominalisations can be defined as verb-derived nounphrases with a syntactic structure parallel to a verbal predication, as in The enemy destroyed thecity vs. The destruction of the city by the enemy. Thus, this study considers the morphologicalrelations holding between derived nouns and their verbal bases of derivation on the onehand, and the derived constructions that revolve around deverbal nominals, on the other.The verbs in focus are those belonging to the classes of inaction, namely, Fail verbs, Endverbs, Try verbs, Hinder verbs, Refrain verbs, Prevent verbs and Forbid verbs. The theoreticalbasis is provided by Role and Reference Grammar (Van Valin and LaPolla 1997; Van Valin2005). The data have been retrieved from the Dictionary of Old English Corpus and the Yorkcorpora of Old English, including the prose and the poetry segments. Lexical informationon the bases of derivation and derivational paradigms of the items under analysis has beenretrieved from NerthusV3 (Martín Arista et al. 2016). The results show that, with fewexceptions, these sets of verbs take part in nominalisations implying nouns inflected for thegenitive. Up to 37 nominalisations of this kind have been found with these verbs, which canbe classified into four types on semantic and syntactic grounds. The main conclusion is thatdeverbal nominalisations give rise to constructions parallel to verbal predications, thuscontributing to the acquisition of verbal features by noun phrases (Fischer 1992: 252), whichanticipates the subsequent development of syntactic verbal properties that takes place duringthe Middle English period.