Names are not always things

PalmaSurely everyone has said or heard at some point a sentence like this: “The construction of the building lasted two years”. If we look at it, this sentence has something curious: there is a noun, ‘construction’, that does something that, at first, we wouldn't expect from a noun: it has a duration. We can say how long the construction lasted, we can say it was fast or slow and even that it was constant. On the other hand, if we say that “the construction at the end of the street is new”, we are no longer talking about the process of building, but about the result: the building that has been built. The word is exactly the same, but what it designates is quite different.

Function within the sentence

This is interesting because we usually imagine nouns as a category that is quite easy to identify and define. Certainly, they are easy to identify: everyone who has been through school knows that ‘chair’, ‘building’, ‘train’, ‘professor’ are nouns and that, on the other hand, ‘to build’, ‘to arrive’, ‘to visit’ are verbs. The definition, however, is more complex. In general, we would say that the former designate people, objects, or entities and the latter, actions, processes, or states. However, when we start to look closely at what nouns do within sentences, this comfortable separation blurs a bit.

Linguistics speaks of ‘eventive nouns’ to refer to nouns that can denote states, activities, processes, or events and that, furthermore, can select the participants that intervene in what they designate. The term ‘eventive’ may seem a bit strange, especially because ‘event’ is not a Catalan word but it is the designation used in this field to refer to what in English is called ‘eventive noun’. Beyond the term, however, what is interesting is the behavior: there are nouns that can function as predicates and that present properties that we usually associate with verbs.

‘Destruction’ is a good example. In “I witnessed the destruction of the old exams by the professor”, ‘destruction’ does not designate an object or the result of an action, but an event. And, since we have an event, we also have participants: the exams that are destroyed and the professor who destroys them. The noun, therefore, preserves a part of the structure that the corresponding verb would have.

Nouns with more than one meaning

This is seen even better with words that can have more than one reading. Let's take ‘entry’, for example. While if we say that “the station entrance is very beautiful” we are referring to a place (or an entity), when we state that “the train's entry into the station took place at two o'clock” we are talking about the event of entering. The same word can designate a thing or what happens with that thing, depending on the context. This double possibility is, precisely, one of the cases that have traditionally been called ‘action and effect nouns’.

But how can we know what we have before us? In reality, it is not enough to look at the word in the dictionary. One of the most interesting clues is time. Eventive nouns have lexical aspect, which allows them to incorporate certain properties related to the way an event unfolds. That is why we can say that “the construction of the university's new building lasted two years”, comment that “the construction of a hospital in such a short time is impossible” and that “we are tired of the constant construction of roads”. In these examples, ‘construction’ behaves like the name of a process: we can talk about its duration, place it temporally and characterize the way it unfolds.

We can also talk about ‘frequent visits to the doctor’ and ‘NASA's constant explorations of Mars’. ‘Frequent’ and ‘constant’ are especially useful modifiers because they favor the reading as an event of a noun that could be ambiguous. A ‘frequent visit’ is not a thing that has the property of ‘being frequent’: it is the visits, understood as events, that occur often

And there is yet another characteristic that brings event nouns closer to verbs: they can have arguments. Once again, there is no need to be frightened by the term. When we say that “the Czech student visited the UIB”, the verb ‘to visit’ establishes a relationship between two participants: someone who makes the visit and someone or something that is visited. If we convert the verb into a noun, this relationship does not disappear entirely: we can comment, for example, that “the Czech student's visit to the UIB was too short”.

Nominal disguise?

This does not mean, however, that we can convert any verb into a noun and expect the result to behave in the same way. Event nouns are not verbs in a nominal disguise. The parallelism exists, but there are also important differences. Furthermore, not all nouns that are related to verbs are eventive: ‘professor’, for example, is morphologically related to ‘profess’, but it does not designate an activity or a process. It designates a person. Therefore, the fact that a noun is derived from a verb does not tell us, by itself, what behavior it will have.

The distinction between eventive and resultative nouns cannot be resolved with a single test either: to distinguish between eventive and resultative readings, linguistics has proposed various criteria. Some tests, however, depend on the context and there are nouns that allow for more than one interpretation.

In fact, one of the interesting questions is precisely this: studying event nouns forces us to look a little more closely at what a noun does within a sentence. ‘Construction’ can designate a process or the result of that process; ‘entrance’ can refer to an entity or an event; ‘visits’ can speak of several occurrences of an activity.

The distinction between nouns and verbs is enormously useful, obviously, but it is not based solely on that widespread idea that nouns ‘name things’ and verbs ‘express actions’. A noun, therefore, is not always a thing.