This article presents a corpus study of over 16,000 tokens of -er nominalizations on 62 verbal bases that were extracted from the Corpus of Contemporary American English and the British National Corpus. We show that an individual -er nominal can often be given a range of modal and aspectual readings and that a number of factors influence the availability of different readings for -er nominals, including verb type, syntactic context (verb tenses, adverbs), and encyclopedic information. On the basis of these data, we argue, contra Cohen (2016), that the core meaning of the affix -er (as in writer, printer, etc.) cannot be that of a dynamic modal. We show that neither Cohen’s (2016) analysis nor syntactic analyses such as that of Alexiadou and Schäfer (2010) can account for the range of readings we find. We conclude by sketching one possible analysis in terms of the Lexical Semantic Framework of Lieber (2004, 2016) that postulates underspecified lexical representations of the -er nominals and resolution of underspecification in context.

中文翻译：

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英语中形容词名词的解释中的方面和形式

本文提供了一个语料库研究，该语料库基于62个语言基础上超过16,000个-er名词化标记，这些语料来自当代美国英语语料库和英国国家语料库。我们表明，一个-er名词通常可以被赋予一系列的模态和方面的读物，并且许多因素影响-er名词的不同读物的可用性，包括动词类型，句法语境（动词时态，副词）和百科全书信息。与这些数据相反，我们与科恩相反（Cohen，2016）认为，词缀-er的核心含义（如在作家，打印机等中）不能是动态模态。我们发现，无论是科恩（2016）的分析还是像Alexiadou和Schäfer（2010）这样的句法分析都不能解释我们发现的阅读范围。