A functional account for the productivity of English -er nominals

This paper offers a descriptive generalization on the English -er nominalization based on a functional-cognitive-semantic concept habituality as a condition on -er nominalization. Fairly an extensive literature on this topic has so far been offered in terms of syntactic structures, particularly arguments structure of the base verbs. Many of these research works do shed a new light on the various facets of English -er nominalization, but still missing from these discussions is a comprehensive understanding of the phenomena revolving around these nominalizations. These works simply exclude from their discussion the -er nominals that are derived from nouns, adjectives, prepositions, and various phrases simply because they do not involve argument structure. Various proposals couched in functional-semantic framework offer a comprehensive account for this phenomenon. Our proposal is an effort in this line of approach. We argue that -er nominalization is allowed if habituality or durativity is secured enough to be considered as representing inherent properties. (Hallym University · Chungnam National University)