When Nouns Surface as Verbs

Abstract

People readily create and understand denominal verbs they have never heard before, as in to porch a newspaper and to Houdini one's way out of a closet. The meanings are best accounted for by a theory of interpretation that specifies what the verbs mean on particular occasions of their use. Our proposal is that their use is regulated by a convention: in using such a verb, the speaker means to denote the kind of state, event, or process that, he has good reason to believe, the listener can readily and uniquely compute on this occasion, on the basis of their mutual knowledge, in such a way that the parent noun (e.g. porch or Houdini ) denotes one role in the state, event, or process, and the remaining surface arguments of the denominal verb denote others of its roles. This convention accounts for the meaning and acceptability of innovative verbs in various contexts; similar conventions may be needed to account for other innovative uses of language.