1 [To appear in V. Demonte & L. McNally (eds.), Telicity and change of state in natural languages: implications for event structure. Oxford: Oxford University Press.] From Psych Verbs to Nouns Antonio Fábregas, Rafael Marín, and Louise McNally Universitetet i Tromsø, CNRS/Université Lille 3, and Universitat Pompeu Fabra 1 Introduction As the study of lexical aspect (or Aktionsart) has extended from the verbal domain to the domain of eventuality-denoting nouns, it has become natural to ask to what extent the aspectual properties of different verbs are shared by the nouns that derive from those verbs. Meinschäfer (2003, 2005), for example, posits that the lexical aspect of a verb is preserved under nominalization if the resulting nominal denotes an eventuality and there is no independent evidence that the nominalizing morphology consistently induces a particular aspectual effect, such as is the case, she argues, with French –ment and Spanish –miento. 1 We will refer to this claim as the Aspect Preservation Hypothesis (hereafter, APH). Though the APH might seem like a reasonable null hypothesis concerning the relation between verbs and derivationally related nouns (or, as we will generally refer to them here, nominalizations), it appears at first to be challenged by what has been said in the literature about the lexical aspect of psychological verbs and that of the corresponding nouns. Specifically, while it seems clear that not all psych verbs are stative (see e.g. Pustejovsky 1988, 1991, Fontana 1991, Treviño 1992, Arad 1998, Cabré and Mateu 1998, Parodi and Luján 2000, Landau 2002, Marín and McNally 2011, and the references cited in these works), it has been widely claimed or assumed that all psych nouns are (see e.g. Pesetsky 1995: 71-72). 2 The goal of this paper is to argue that, at least for the case of Spanish, despite initial appearances, the relation between psych verbs and nouns is quite systematic and does not violate the APH. Crucial to our argument is the fact observation that not all psych nouns are derived from verbs; some, like enfado „anger‟, are underived. Strikingly, though we find that various subclasses of psych verbs which can be argued to have stative verb stems yield both derived and underived psych nouns, one particular class of psych verbs never undergoes nominalization, namely those that can be argued to have strictly punctual verb stems, where punctuality is defined as in Marín and McNally (2011) (see below for discussion). These latter verbs, we maintain, are not stative. Table 1 summarizes the facts: Derived psych noun Underived psych noun Nonstative psych verb stem (e.g. enfadar „to anger‟) unattested enfado „anger‟ Stative psych verb stem (e.g. aburrir „to bore‟, indignar „to upset‟, interesar „to interest‟) aburrimiento „boredom‟ indignación „indignation‟ interés „interest‟ Table 1. Relation between the semantics of psych verb stems and the (non)existence of derived nominals