Reflections about verb-nominal constructions (CVN)

Abstract

This contribution deals with the great variety of phenomena which may be covered by the term “verbonominal constructions” (for instance collocations, phraseological units) and suggests a subdivision for the lexicalized and not yet lexicalized cooccurrence of verbs and nouns. After a brief description of the state-of-the-art, emphasis is given to the explanation of the collocability of lexical units. First the paper focuses on the valency of verbs and nouns. Then it presents some considerations about the collocability of nouns with verbs which are specifying the most prototypical predications about the referent instantiated by the concrete and autoincident noun. In this context three axes are distinguished: (i) one expressing the existence of the designated things (and, for instance, their genesis or production); (ii) the no-being-more or disappearance and (iii) the change of the being (property, etc.) of these things. Moreover, the paper presents the properties of another subgroup of verbonominal constructions. Such constructions consist of a verb which has almost completely lost its semantics and functions as a support, whereas the combined or collocated noun, with its relational semantics and heteroincidental features, conveys all the semantic information, or, at least, its major part. Based on numerous investigations about these constructions with functional verbs or verbs of support in German, an attempt is made to distinguish several subgroups of this kind of verbonominal constructions and to compare them to other constructions with “full verbs” and nouns which present distinct semantic properties. They are no more heteroincident nor abstract, but concrete nouns.