Verbing and Linguistic Innovation
Authors: Michaelis Laura A. , Hsiao Allen Minchun 
Published: July 2021

Denominal verbs are produced by a syntactic category shift,conversion, in which the word’s inflectional and combinatory potential change while its internal composition does not (Valera, 2015: 322). Perhaps no language owes as many of its verbs to the conversion strategy as English (Koutsoukos, 2021), the majority being denominal (noun-derived) verbs, e.g.,Widespread seedless cultivars typicallyfruittwice yearly in the Caribbean. Denominal conversion has been the predominant method of verb creation since the 13th century (Gottfurcht, 2008), with the result that denominal verbs present a continuum of conventionality ranging from conventional verb-phrase replacements likepaint, trash, pocket, motherto evanescent innovations likeadultingandcriming. Language users must rely on certain inferential strategies to figure out what novel denominal verbs mean, combining information from multiple sources, including salient properties of the source noun’s denotatum, the event structure of the clause in which that noun serves as a predicator, and socio-cultural knowledge. How exactly does this work? Our answer recalls the major lessons of Clark and Clark’s seminal 1979 paper “When Nouns Surface as Verbs”: denominal verbs have context-dependent rather than fixed meanings, and their interpretations rely on cooperation between speaker and hearer. These are lessons seemingly forgotten by proponents of recent, influential derivation-based accounts, which leverage the formal similarity between denominal verbs and noun-incorporating verbs likebackstabandmanspread. While, as discussed here, syntacticized approaches to semantic representation fail to account for the interpretive latitude that denominal verbs actually display, there are reasons to reject a strong view of context dependence as well. For Clark and Clark, interpretations of innovative denominal verbs either directly reflect criterial features of their source nouns or aread hoc, derived from “moment-to-moment cooperation,” including gestures, allusions, and “other momentarily relevant facts about the conversation” (1979: 783). We argue that denominal interpretations are more tightly regulated, and involve reconciling the results of four distinct interpretive strategies: nominal frame computation, verb-construction integration, co-composition and, finally, conceptual blending. To describe these interpretive strategies, we bring to bear a suite of analytic tools developed to model everyday language understanding: Construction Grammar (Michaelis, 2004;Goldberg, 2006;Michaelis, 2011), enriched composition (Pustejovsky, 1998;Pustejovsky, 2012), Conceptual Blending Theory (Fauconnier and Turner, 2004), and Frame Semantics (Fillmore, 2006;Andor, 2010). In line withClark and Clark’s (1979)convention for the interpretation of innovative denominal verbs, we argue that nouns used in innovative denominal formations are chosen based on relational properties of entities denoted by those nouns, whether common or proper (e.g., shape, behavior, composition, use, provenance). At the same time, the descriptive framework that we propose leaves fewer interpretive factors to vagaries of context.