Polysemy of Italian Event Nominals

It is well-known that event nominals tend to have both an event and one or more non-event interpretations. However, the representation of their polysemy can be improved. On one hand, the process-result ambiguity (Grimshaw 1990, Borer 1999) captures only a fragment of the phenomenon, given that result interpretations are not the only option available for event nominals. On the other hand, it has been assumed that result nominalizations introduce an additional semantic argument place, which may be filled by anything related causally to the event (Asher 1993: 151). Result nominals, however, may also bind a true argument of the event, while non-result interpretations may not bind a result argument or a true argument but rather a default argument, a shadow argument or even an adjunct (cf. section 4). In other words, event nominals may potentially exploit the whole conceptual space of the event. Given these premises, the general aim of this paper is to contribute to the representation of the semantic ambiguity exhibited by nominals denoting events by providing an empirically well-founded list of sense alternations as found in corpus data. My specific goal is to investigate what elements of the event tend to be available for the restricted set of interpretations that event nominals may exhibit. Also, I intend to contribute to model event nominal polysemy in terms of semantic types. The language discussed is Italian but the proposed generalizations may expand on a broader perspective.