Valency in Morphological Constructions

Certain English deverbal adjectives display different valency than their root verbs. For example, adjectives derived with ‘-able’ will always predicate a patient or theme argument, even if the verb which ‘-able’ suffixes is unergative (e.g. ‘laughable’). Di Sciullo and Williams (1987) and Lieber (2004) propose a lexicalist approach in which these adjectival suffixes are functors with semantic requirements. Alternatively, Construction Grammar more easily handles coercion of verb sense via unification into constructions, some of which are morphological (Goldberg 1995; Booij 2010). Thus, a constructional approach suggests that derivational morphology specifies valency through overrides. In this talk I explore the precise mechanisms by which this may occur in the inheritance network (Goldberg 2006; Hudson 2007), while looking towards larger implications on predication and the syntax/morphology division in Construction Grammar.