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  • Bickerton, Derek. 1990. Language and Species. Chicago - University o F Chicago Press. Clark, Eve, and Herb Clark. 1979. "When Nouns Surface As Verbs." Language SS - 767-811 PDF

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    Sebastián Silva
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    Bickerton, Derek. 1990. Language and Species. Chicago- University o f Chicago Press. Clark, Eve, and Herb Clark. 1979. %22When Nouns Surface as Verbs.%22 Language SS- 767-811.pdf

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    321 vizualizări46 pagini

    Bickerton, Derek. 1990. Language and Species. Chicago - University o F Chicago Press. Clark, Eve, and Herb Clark. 1979. "When Nouns Surface As Verbs." Language SS - 767-811 PDF

    Încărcat de

    Sebastián Silva

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    © All Rights Reserved
    Descărcați ca PDF sau citiți online pe Scribd
    Indicator pentru conținut neadecvat
    din 46
    When Nouns Surface as Verbs Eve V. Clark; Herbert H. Clark Language, Vol. 55, No. 4 (Dec., 1979), 767-811. Stable URL: butp//links jstor.org/sici?sici=0097-8507% 281979 12% 2955 3A4%3C767%3AWNSAV%3E2.0,CO%3B2-W Language is currently published by Linguistic Society of America ‘Your use of the ISTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR’s Terms and Conditions of Use, available at hhup:/www.jstororg/about/terms.hml. JSTOR’s Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use ofthis work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at hhup:/www jstor.org/journals/Isahum Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the sereen or printed page of such transmission, STOR is an independent not-for-profit organization dedicated to creating and preserving a digital archive of scholarly journals, For more information regarding JSTOR, please contact jstor-info@ umich edu, hupulwwwjstor.org/ Sat Dee 20 19:12:13 2003 WHEN NOUNS SURFACE AS VERBS Eve V. CLARK and Henert H. CLARK Stanford University People readily create and understand denominal verbs they have never heard before, asin o porcha newspaper and to Houdini one's way out of a closet. The meanings are ‘best accounted for by a theory of interpretation that specifies what the verbs mean on particular occasions of their use. Our proposal is that their use is regulated by acon- vention: in using such a verb, the speaker means to denote the kind of state, event, of ‘process that, he has good reason to believe, the listener can readily and uniquely com- ute on this occasion, on the bass of their mutual knowledge, in such a way thatthe parent noun (eg. porch or Houdini) denotes one role in the state, event, oF process, And the remaining surface arguments of the denominal verb denote others of it roles ‘This convention accounts for the meaning and acceptability of innovative verbs in various contexts; similar conventions may be needed to account for other innovative uses of language.* One remarkable aspect of our capacity to use language is our ability to create and understand expressions we have never heard before; we will call these mNNOVA- TIONS, In the right contexts, we readily understand He enfant terrible'd gracefully (said of a workshop participant), or Ruling in death of Ferrari woman (newspaper headline referring to a woman whose will stipulated that she be buried in her Ferrari), or Never ask two China trips t0 the same dinner party (cartoon caption referring to people who had taken trips to China)—even though we have never before heard enfant terrible used as a verb, Ferrari woman used as a compound noun, or China trips used as a shorthand expression. Part of this creativity is readily accounted for, linguistically, by rules of composition. Thus the meaning of rituaness is composed of the meanings of ritual and -ness, according to rules of word formation. But innovations such as enfant terrible'd, Ferrari woman, and. ‘China trips do not appear to be explainable in that way. To decide what they mean on a particular occasion, we must know not only the meanings of their parts, but also something about the time, place, and circumstances in which they are uttered. How these meanings are determined is the main question to which this paper is addressed. To examine this question, we have chosen to look at denominal verbs, ie. nouns that have come to be used as verbs. Innovations within this category are abundant, in such examples as Ruth Buzzi houseguested with Bill Dodge (Herb Caen, SF Chronicle); He wristed the ball over the net (tennis commentator); When you're * The order of authors is arbitrary. We are grateful to our frends, colleagues, and relatives for wittingly and unvitingly providing so much of our data, and to Hiram H. Brownell and C.J. Sengul for their help inthe early stages ofthis study. We also thank the many colleagues Who have commented on preliminary presentations of these ideas expecially Melissa Bowerman, (Charles J. Filmore, W. C, Watt, and Arnold M. Zwicky. We are particularly grateful to Dwight L. Bolinger, Lila R: Gleitman, Judith N. Levi, Julius M, E. Moravesik, Richard T, Oehile, and Edward E, Smith for detailed comments on earlier versions ofthe manuscript. This research was supported in part by NSF Grant BNS-75-17126, NIMH Grant MH-20021, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, and a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship. 161 168 LANGUAGE, VOLUME 58, NUMBER 4 (1979) starting to Sunday School members, then I think you're going too far (a Californian legislator); She would not try to stif-upper-ip it through (Time magazine); Will you cigarette me? (Mae West); We all Wayned and Cagneyed (NY Times magazine); They timbered off the hills in the 1880's (conservation article); and ‘Let us cease t0 sugar-coat, et us cease to white-wash, let us cease to bargain-counter the Bible!” the speaker implored us (James Thurber). The meanings of these innovations are readily determined; but how? Our goal in this paper is to propose an answer to this, question, and so to suggest an explanation for lexical innovation in general ur account is based on the following line of argument. Innovative denominal verbs like Wayned have a SHIFTING sense and denotation—one that depends on the time, place, and circumstances of their use, That makes them different, formally, from indexical expressions like he, as well as from purely denotational expressions like bachelor, both of which have a FIXED sense and denotation. So innovative

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