ARGUMENT LINKING IN DERIVED NOMINALS 401construction, Sara King can only be interpreted as the designer of the
designs, the designs being the result of her designing; in the second con
struction, she can only be interpreted as having certain designs in her pos
session, not as being the designer of the designs.
Thus, these nominals do not behave in a manner expected for nominals
referring to either alienable or inalienable possession. Nonetheless,
because someone who creates something can then also be said to be the
possessor of the product created, it is difficult to rule out a possessive read
ing. Given the ability of both the possessive and the direct-argument of
markers to mark an NP immediately following the vN head, and given the
pragmatic assumption that a creator is simultaneously a possessor of the
thing created, it is perhaps best to treat these iterative ACM "activities"
(i.e. ACT usages derived from ACMs through iterative aspects) as essen
tially ambiguous between a possessive reading in which the of marks the
possessor and an argument reading in which the of marks the CL-A.
In turning to direct-argument linking with two-argument activity vNs,
the discussion must first review an important characteristic of ACT verbs
which complicates the current analysis: English ACT verbs are frequently
susceptible to ACM interpretations. In Dowty's (1979) discussion of this
class of verbs, he remarks, "I have not been able to find a single activity
verb which cannot have an accomplishment sense in at least some special
context" (1979: 61). With verbs like run, of course, distinct ACT vs. ACM
argument structures are overtly expressed in the syntax, distinguishing an
activity verb from an accomplishment verb: Joe ran (ACT) vs. Joe ran to the
store (ACM). In constructions headed by a verb like analyze, however, the
syntactic manifestations of a verb's argument structure are not altered by a
class-sense change, and ambiguity between ACT and ACM senses arises if
additional context is not provided. Without such additional context,
analyze, in Jeri analyzed the data, may be interpreted as an activity, wherein
the verb refers to an unbounded, dynamic state of affairs, or it may be
interpreted as an accomplishment, wherein a caused and bounded state of
affairs is included in the verb's meaning. As an activity, The American
Heritage Dictionary [AHD] definition of "to examine methodically"
expresses the state of affairs in a construction like Jeri analyzed the data all
afternoon. All that can be inferred, here, is that Jeri spent the afternoon
engaged in the activity of methodically examining the data. In Jeri analyzed
the data in less than an hour, however, analyze implies more than methodi
cal examination and instantiates a second AHD definition: "to separate