Fred and David,
I just wanted to let you know that I am not ignoring this thread, but I've been quite busy the last couple of days and I really don't have anything substantial to add. I agree that there seems to be a bias towards denominativization against deverbalization, and it may indeed stem from the fact that nouns are somehow viewed as more basic than verbs.
I just read Cohen's "La phrase nominale et l'evolution du system verbal en Semitique" in which he argues that the versatility of the verbless clause in Semitic drives a cycle of change in Semitic verbal systems by introducing new verbal forms built on the syntax of nominal predicates, an idea with which I substantially agree. However, this is an issue of grammaticalization where a lexical form acquires a grammatical function. The issue of denominativization vs deverbalization is mostly within the realm of lexicon and word formation.
I would guess that there would be a group of words whose meaning is more naturally nominal and a group whose meaning is more naturally verbal so that it would be easy to guess which one came first, but most words probably fall somewhere in between. I would be interested if anyone knows of any research into the topic.
Peter Bekins
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