426 MARY L. NUNES
— i.e. where the possessed NP needs to be foregrounded in relation to the posses
sor NP — the possessor occurs in the inflected prenominal position: the building's
design. Riddle and Deane claim that these choices reflect the discourse function of
the English possessive, which treats the prenominal possessive position as "topic"
(i.e. as central but backgrounded information, frequently what the discourse is
about) and the postnominal possessive position as "focus" (i.e. as foregrounded
information about the topic).
- Notice that entry and entrance are fine in possessive constructions where they are
a possessed element of the NP: The entry of the old house is in bad disrepair', Meet
me at the south entrance of the arena. In nonpossessive constructions, however, the
locative argument can only be marked with into, not of, in all but one of the
speaker dialects encountered in this study: the jubilant entrance into/of'the arena
by the toreador; the surreptitious entry into/of the house by the burglar. A possible
exception to the into-marking requirement was suggested by a speaker of an
Australian dialect who finds the following construction acceptable: the illegal entry
of the premises by the intruder.
- These nominals take the type of paraphrase exemplified in (34):
(i) The knowledge Sue has of the Bible is remarkable.
(ii) The envy Jess has for Ralph's car is ridiculous.
- The parenthesized of is included here and below in deference to those speakers
who are able to get the of y types of constructions with certain mental stative and
envy subclass members (cf. examples given in 35).
- Throughout the study, ambiguity is indicated by the "#" notation.
- Desire is the only member of this group whose verb correlate does not mark its y
argument with for in the clause. In the vNP, however, desire follows the group
pattern in using the for.
- That is, the boundedness of ACMs permits them to be treated as entities where all
dimensions are perceived at one time.
- See also Hopper and Thompson (1984), who comment that ".. .percepts which are
thing-like and highly time-stable are almost certain to be classed as grammatical
N's, while percepts which involve participants in motion are almost certain to be
classed as V's" (1984: 706). In terms of the "nouniness squish" and the current dis
cussion, then, in the absence of into ΝΡ·indir.arg types of phrases to force "in
motion" interpretations, the time-stability of bounded ACMs would naturally
override the verb-like dynamic nature of ACTs in the interpretation of nominali-
zations capable of having both V-class senses.
- With a tiny class of ACT vNs which select mass-N χ arguments, an ACM reading
is not automatically rendered in the absence of the y argument. For a preliminary
discussion of two of the members of that class (invasion and infestation), see
Nunes (1990: 90-93).
