The DOI matches its Crossref record; 4 of the 4 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
When Nouns Surface as Verbs
Abstract
People readily create and understand denominal verbs they have never heard before, as in to porch a newspaper and to Houdini one's way out of a closet. The meanings are best accounted for by a theory of interpretation that specifies what the verbs mean on particular occasions of their use. Our proposal is that their use is regulated by a convention: in using such a verb, the speaker means to denote the kind of state, event, or process that, he has good reason to believe, the listener can readily and uniquely compute on this occasion, on the basis of their mutual knowledge, in such a way that the parent noun (e.g. porch or Houdini ) denotes one role in the state, event, or process, and the remaining surface arguments of the denominal verb denote others of its roles. This convention accounts for the meaning and acceptability of innovative verbs in various contexts; similar conventions may be needed to account for other innovative uses of language.
Overview
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Citations
Cites
Grice, H. P. (1975) · Speech Acts · doi:10.1163/9789004368811_003 · Cited by 23,221
Searle, J. R. (1969) · doi:10.1017/cbo9781139173438 · Cited by 11,718
The Biological Foundations of Language
Lenneberg, E. H. (1967) · Hospital Practice · doi:10.1080/21548331.1967.11707799 · Cited by 6,605
Basic objects in natural categories
Rosch, E., Mervis, C. B., Gray, W. D., Johnson, D. M., & Boyes-Braem, P. (1976) · Cognitive Psychology · doi:10.1016/0010-0285(76)90013-x · Cited by 5,643
Cited by
Croft, W., & Cruse, D. A. (2004) · doi:10.1017/cbo9780511803864 · Cited by 3,316
Conceptual pacts and lexical choice in conversation.
Brennan, S. E., & Clark, H. H. (1996) · Journal of Experimental Psychology Learning Memory and Cognition · doi:10.1037//0278-7393.22.6.1482 · Cited by 1,457
Self-citationChang, F., Dell, G. S., & Bock, K. (2006) · Psychological Review · doi:10.1037/0033-295x.113.2.234 · Cited by 984
The Oxford Guide to Practical Lexicography
Atkins, B. T. S., & Rundell, M. (2008) · doi:10.1093/oso/9780199277704.001.0001 · Cited by 939
Learning argument structure generalizations
(2004) · cogl · doi:10.1515/cogl.2004.011 · Cited by 678
Metadata
- Authors
- Clark, E. V., & Clark, H. H.
- Venue
- Language
- Publisher
- JSTOR
- Published
- 1979-12
- Volume
- 55
- Issue
- 4
- Pages
- 767
- ISSN
- 0097-8507 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W2039383740
- Cited by
- 1,174
- References
- 4
- FWCI
- 93.67
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
How to cite
Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.
- This page
- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: When Nouns Surface as Verbs. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.2307/412745
- The paper
- Clark, E. V., & Clark, H. H. (1979). When Nouns Surface as Verbs. Language. https://doi.org/10.2307/412745
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
