Semantic of events in the nominal domain: differences and similarities between nominalizations and event-denoting nouns

Abstract

Event-denoting nouns (ENDs) with no verbal counterpart, such as cirurgia (‘surgery’) and terremoto (‘earthquake’), constitute a class, which is usually set aside from the literature on nouns denoting events, in contrast to nominalizations. In this paper, after arguing linguistically that EDNs do denote events, we aim at providing a structural explanation on this property, based on Distributed Morphology framework (Halle & Marantz, 1993). We claim that there are two different structures denoting events and that EDNs raise important questions to the semantic of events of natural language.