This paper examines the properties of three of the suffixes available to create eventive deverbal nouns in French, namely -age, -ment and -ion. The explored hypothesis is that these suffixes have an abstract semantical and aspectual value which contributes to explain why verbs select different suffixes in the operation of nominalisation, as well as the semantical differences between two nominalisations derived from the same verbal base with different suffixes.
This chapter is dedicated to an ambiguity characteristic of what we call defeasible causative verbs (of which ‘teach’ is an example). With agentive subjects, the change of state (CoS) encoded by these verbs (e.g. a learning process) can be entirely denied, giving rise to what we call the “zero-CoS” non-culminating reading of these verbs. With causer subjects, however, the same verbs seem to entail the occurrence of (a part of) the CoS (including in imperfective sentences). We argue that this ambiguity cannot be handled by positing different event structures under the agentive and non-agentive uses. Under the analysis proposed, the semantics of these verbs involve a sublexical modal component à la Koenig and Davis (2001), both with agent and causer subjects. In favor of positing a sublexical modality with all types of subject, we investigate the conditions under which the zero-CoS reading is available even with a subset of inanimate subjects and “non-intentional” agents.
This paper offers an account for why, cross-linguistically, denying the whole change of state encoded by causative verbs is easier with agent than with causer subjects. It does so by extending Varasdi's theory of the progressive to non-culminating reading sof causative verbs, not only in progressive but also in perfective sentences. It additionally sustains two claims about the difference between agentive and nonagentive ongoing causation events: only the former (a) can in principle start before their potential effects start and (b) are systematically `indicative' of these potential effects.
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