Intransitive psych verbs and nominalisation in Xitsonga

Abstract

Although scholars generally agree that there are some similarities between verbs and their associative derived nominals, they are yet to find common ground as to the extent of the verbal properties that are shared by their nominal counterparts. In this article the extent of similarities between psych verbs and their associated derived nominals in Xitsonga were examined, while attention was paid to properties that are inherited by the derived nominals. The derived nominals that were examined were derived from intransitive verbs. Noun classes that allow nominalisations to occur more regularly and those that do not allow the regular occurrence of nominalisations were identified. The semantic structures of the derived nominals under investigation were analysed in terms of Pustejovsky's Generative Lexicon Theory (1995) of lexical semantic representation of nominals, which included these levels of meaning, namely the argument structure, the event structure and the qualia structure so as to establish whether they inherit the semantic features of their verbal counterparts. The idea of classifying nominals into stage-level nominals and individual-level nominals (Busa, 1996) were considered to see whether the same notion held for derived nominals from psych verbs in Xitsonga.