Categories of denominal verbs

The meanings of ordinary denominal verbs, it seems clear, bear at least an approximate relationship to their ‘parent’ nouns, from which they were historically derived. The verb bottle bears some relation, at least diachronically, to its parent noun bottle. To illustrate the major relationships, we will present a classification of more than 1300 denominal verbs collected from newspapers, magazines, novels, radio, television, consultants, and previous studies. To make our task manageable, we have included only those verbs that fit these four guidelines:

(a) Each verb had to be formed from its parent noun without affixation (though with possible final voicing, as in shelve).This is by far the commonest method of forming denominal verbs in English.

(b) The parent noun of each verb had to denote a palpable object or property of such an object, as in sack, knee, and author — but not climax, function, or question. As Marchand points out, the former comprise the majority of denominal verbs in English. In any case, we wished to found our theory of interpretation on what people know about states, events, and processes associated with concrete objects. There is no theoretical reason to assume that the other denominal verbs are subject to fundamentally different principles.

(c) Each verb had to have a non-metaphorical concrete use as far as possible. This again was to help keep our theory of interpretation within limits, although in some cases we couldn’t avoid examining certain extended meanings.

(d) Each verb had to be usable as a genuine finite verb. This excluded expressions like three-towered and six-legged, which occur only as denominal adjectives.

In this classification we have put innovations like houseguest, Sunday School, and Wayne in with ordinary denominal verbs like land, ape, and man, which are already well established as verbs. For one thing, innovations and well-established verbs are really two ends of a continuum, with no sharp dividing line between them. For another, the words that are at present well established as verbs were themselves once innovations; so, by surveying both, we will get a more complete picture of the process of innovation. These are issues we will take up in more detail later. Never­theless, we have marked what to our British or American ears are innovations with a raised plus (thus ⁺blanket the bed). We cannot expect full agreement on these judgments, for reasons that will become clear later.

The classification that we have come to, like those of Jespersen, Marchand, and Adams, really applies to the paraphrases of these verbs. For each main category there is a general paraphrase that roughly fits most of its members. The paraphrases themselves are then classified on the basis of the case role that the parent noun plays in them; we have labeled most of the categories with the names for the case roles given by Fillmore. These paraphrases, however, are no more than heuristic devices, enabling us to group verbs with similar origins. They do not (and, as we shall see, cannot) capture all the content of each verb. Most of the well-established verbs are specialized in ways not capturable in general paraphrases. More importantly, these paraphrases are not intended to represent the sources from which the verbs are derived, either now or historically. Indeed, the theories that assume such derivation, we will argue, are inadequate to handle even the innova­tions among these verbs. The theory of interpretation we offer below does not work from these sources. In brief, the paraphrases are not themselves intended to carry any theoretical significance.

1.1. locatum verbs are ones whose parent nouns are in the objective case in clauses that describe the location of one thing with respect to another. Blanket is such a verb, as shown by the relation between the verb blanket in 1 and the noun blanket in 2, a paraphrase:

(1) Jane blanketed the bed.

(2) Jane did something to cause it to come about that [the bed had one or more blankets on it].

Extending our kinship terminology, we will call the clause in square brackets in 2 the ‘parent clause’ for the verb blanket. In the parent clause, blanket is in the objective case. All the other transitive locatum verbs in List 1 also fit this pattern.