Sortale Bedeutung und Argumentstruktur: ung-Nominalislerungen im Deutschen

In this paper we are concerned with the linking properties of deverbal ung-nominalizations in German. Word-syntactic approaches often deduce the argument realization of ung-nominalizations from those of the base verb by means of morpho-syntactic inheritance rules. Usually it is assumed that the ung-nominalization inherits the accusative object of the base verb as a postnominal genitive. Our claim, however, is that the verbal and the nominal linking systems are independent: The linking properties of nominalization cannot therefore be deduced from the subcategorization frame of the underlying verb. We argue instead that the argument realization of each lexical entry is determined by its semantic representation and category specific linking rules. This modular approach, based on lexical meaning structures, is equally valid for event nominalizations, result nominalizations and object nominalizations with -ung. We show that both event structure and thematic structure play an important role for the linking of an argument to the postnominal genitive position. If the semantic representation contains a change-of-state operator, its linking properties are fixed: Only the lowest thematic argument embedded under BECOME can be realized as a postnominal genitive. Otherwise, any thematic argument can be linked to this position. Hence, in our approach the possible interpretations for postnominal genitives are directly determined by lexical semantics.