Verb-to-noun conversion in Polish: Multiple schemas in Construction Morphology

Abstract This article shows that deverbal conversion nouns in Polish fall into several classes, depending on their inflectional properties and on their semantic interpretation, e. g. rzut ‘throw’, rząd ‘government’, odnowa ‘renovation’, and przystań ‘haven, wharf’. In a theoretical framework which recognizes zero morphemes as nominalizers, such a situation would call for the recognition of many homonymous zero affixes (each specifying a distinct inflection class or a different semantic paraphrase of the resulting zero-derivative). It is argued here that a more felicitous account of this type of verb-to-noun derivation in Polish can be offered in the framework of Construction Morphology. It involves the postulation of multiple construction schemas which express the form-meaning correspondence observable in various subtypes of conversion nouns. Such low-level schemas are treated as instantiations of more general (high-level) schemas and they form a network of morphological constructions in a hierarchical lexicon.