Variable direction in zero-derivation and the unity of polysemous lexical items

Abstract

The adjective, noun, and verb fett/Fett/fett- ‘fat’ in German are polysemous in each word class. The zero-derivational relationships that hold between them are described. The theoretical points are made (i) that, in cases of polysemy, individual senses rather than lexical items as a whole are involved in zero-derivation, and (ii) that, in this particular case, the direction of derivation differs depending on which of the senses are implicated, going from noun to adjective (substance to contentiveness) or from adjective to noun (dimension to state), and thereby precluding the designation of one lexical classification as basic tout court. The implication of such cases is that, with their individual semantic components so autonomous as to be alternately basic and derived in different morphological oppositions, ‘lexical entries’, categorised in terms of word class, cannot be the integral principal organising units of mental lexicons and dictionaries they are commonly taken to be.