Event Structure of Hill Mari Denominal Verbs
Event Structure of Hill Mari Denominal Verbs

Summary/Abstract: The paper deals with the event structure of denominal verbs in Hill Mari, a Finno-Ugric language. In Hill Mari, denominal (as well as some deadjectival) verbs are derived using the same suffix giving rise to several different structural types of predicates. The paper focuses on the properties of denominal predicates that are of interest to the theory and typology of the phenomenon and that are not predicted by the existing theories of denominal derivation. Some influential theories assume that there is one-to-one correspondence between the semantic properties of the base stems and those of their denominal/deadjectival counterparts. Namely, quantized nouns and closed-scale adjectives should give rise to telic verbs, whereas cumulative nouns and open-scaled adjectives should derive atelic ones. However, in many cases, this prediction is not confirmed by the Hill Mari data. Namely, I present the data showing that the semantic properties of base adjectives are not transferred to the derived predicate and consider some other cases of denominal derivation challenging the existing theories. I also suggest that these facts can be accounted for if one assumes that the derivational suffix encodes the process component (equivalent to DO or BECOME operator in various theories of predicate decomposition) determining distributional properties of the predicate. I present the language-specific tests sensitive to the event structure of the predicate that allow us to confirm this hypothesis. Finally, I show how the Hill Mari data contribute to our understanding of the phenomenon under study and present a tentative typology of denominal derivational affixes.

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