aspect, countability, individuation, nominalization, telicity

What is it about?

The paper presents the results of a study investigating a possible influence of the viewpoint (perfectivevs. imperfective) and lexical (telicvs.atelic) aspect of Polish verbs on the countability of eventive nominalizations (substantiva verbalia) derived from these verbs. Polish substantiva verbalia preserve many properties of the base verbs, including the eventive meaning and aspectual morphology. Native speakers of Polish rated the acceptability of nominalizations in count and mass contexts. An effect of both viewpoint and lexical aspect was found in mass contexts, where aspectually delimited (perfective, accomplishment) nominalizations were less acceptable than non-delimited (imperfective, state) nominalizations. In count contexts, only an effect of the lexical aspect was clearly present, with accomplishment nominalizations being more acceptable than state nominalizations. The nominalizations were overall rated as more natural in mass than count constructions, regardless of the aspect. The results indicate that aspect plays a role in establishing the countability of a word, but it does not fully determine it.

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Why is it important?

The results of the present study provide evidence in favor of the link between aspect and countability postulated in the literature (Bach 1986; Filip 2003; Jackendoff 1992; Krifka 1989; Mourelatos 1978; Wellwood et al. 2018). In an acceptability judgment study, participants rated nominalizations derived from aspectually delimited verbs as less natural in mass contexts than nominalizations derived from non-delimited verbs. This was true for both types of aspect: viewpoint and lexical. The results for count contexts also showed that aspectual delimitation may make a nominalization more count, although the effect in this case was limited to the lexical aspect only. Thus,the lexical aspect (the genera lsituation profile involving a natural end point) seems to interact with the mass or count reading of a nominalization more consistently than the viewpoint aspect (perceiving the situation as temporally bounded whole or as ongoing). The results are consistent with the possibility that linguistic ontology in the nominal and verbal domains is founded on similar cognitive principles, including the fundamental distinction between solid objects and fluid substances (Janda 2004). However, aspect cannot fully account for the mass or count status of a nominalization, since the nominalizations used in the present study were overall rated rather poorly in count contexts, regardless of the aspectual class. This is in line with the account assuming that countability (for ordinary nouns as well as for nominalizations) is a multidimensional phenomenon with multiple sources of reference individuation (Grimm 2013; Joosten 2003).