Verbalizing nouns and adjectives: The case of behavior-related verbs

Abstract

In languages such as French, it is possible to derive from nouns or adjectives unergative verbs that intuitively describe ways of behaving, for example, diplomatiser ‘behave like a diplomat’, or bêtifier ‘behave like an idiot’. In addition to their unergative use, a number of behavior-related verbs have formally identical counterparts that are causative, anticausative or transitive activity verbs. The availability of the additional uses depends on the morphological make-up of the verb. This paper provides a semantic analysis of each use of these verbs, which is derived in a compositional fashion from the meaning of their different morphological pieces. We focus on the semantic contribution of the incorporated noun or adjective, by looking at the entailment patterns between the verb (e.g., diplomatiser ‘behave like a diplomat’, bêtifier ‘behave like an idiot’) and the corresponding noun (e.g., être (un/une) diplomate ‘be a diplomat’) or adjective (e.g., être bête ‘be stupid’). We observe that the noun is (re)interpreted in the same way in both the behavior-related verb and the figurative reading of the indefinite NP. The analysis proposed explicitly captures this figurative reading of (e.g.) être un/une diplomate ‘be a diplomat’, the link between the meaning shift of N in this reading and in diplomatiser ‘behave like a diplomat’, the additional causative, anti-causative and non-causative transitive uses of the verbs at study, as well as the entailment patterns observed. We also account for the way the morphosyntactic makeup of the predicate restricts the range of available readings.

Keywords

• behavior-related verb
• unergative verb
• (anti-)causative verb
• indefinite NP
• stereotype
• figurative reading