Event denoting -er nominalizations in German

Abstract

As in other Germanic or Romance languages, -er nominalizations in German typically denote the external argument of the verb they are derived from irrespectively of its specific thematic role. This type of -er nominalizations is totally productive across languages. As observed in the literature, -er nominalizations across languages sometimes denote what looks like the internal argument of the verb they are derived from and one can even find -er nominalizations derived from adjectives, prepositions or nouns. The latter types of -er nominalizations are, however, not fully productive but (to some extent) idiosyncratic. I will show that German has one further type of -er nominalizations which does not denote an entity but an event. It turns out that these event denoting –er nominalizations are restricted to one specific type of predicates, namely semelfactives. Within this class of semelfactives, the derivation of event denoting -er nominalizations turns out to be totally productive. I suggest that the restriction that event denoting –er nominalizations can only be derived from verbs expressing semelfactive events tells us something about the meaning or the selectional restrictions of the derivational morpheme -er.