When Numbers Surface as Verbs: A Qualia-Oriented Analysis of Denumeral Verbs

This work puts forth a preliminary analysis of the semantics of English ‘denumeral verbs’, i.e., verbs resulting from the conversion of numbers into verbs, as in the case of to 747 ‘to fly on a 747 Boeing aircraft’ or to 991 ‘to call the police dialing 911’. After retrieving 296 instances of denumeral verbs from the EnTenTen15 corpus that were traced back to the same 47 denumeral verb lemmas, these were divided into ten categories based on their semantics and community of use. We adopted Generative Lexicon Theory – specifically Qualia roles – to investigate the contribution of the semantics of the base (i.e., the number) to the semantics of the converted verb. We were able to identify 21 denumeral verbs exploiting the Telic quale of their underlying number, 17 verbs exploiting the Agentive quale and 4 verbs exploiting the Constitutive quale. These findings suggest that Qualia values may not be all on the same level in terms of exploitability and that – at least for what concerns the verbs in our sample – accessing information concerning the goal (Telic quale) or origin (Agentive quale) of an entity is easier than accessing information on its internal composition (Constitutive quale) or ontological nature (Formal quale).