We present the results of a large-scale corpus-based comparison of two German event nominalization patterns: deverbal nouns in -ung (e.g., die Evaluierung, ‘the evaluation’) and nominal infinitives (e.g., das Evaluieren, ‘the evaluating’). Among the many available event nominalization patterns for German, we selected these two because they are both highly productive and challenging from the semantic point of view. Both patterns are known to keep a tight relation with the event denoted by the base verb, but with different nuances. Our study targets a better understanding of the differences in their semantic import.

The key notion of our comparison is that of semantic transparency, and we propose a usage-based characterization of the relationship between derived nominals and their bases. Using methods from distributional semantics, we bring to bear two concrete measures of transparency which highlight different nuances: the first one, cosine, detects nominalizations which are semantically similar to their bases; the second one, distributional inclusion, detects nominalizations which are used in a subset of the contexts of the base verb. We find that only the inclusion measure helps in characterizing the difference between the two types of nominalizations, in relation with the traditionally considered variable of relative frequency (Hay, 2001). Finally, the distributional analysis allows us to frame our comparison in the broader coordinates of the inflection vs. derivation cline.

我们展示了基于大规模语料库的两种德语事件名词化模式的比较结果：-ung 中的deverbal 名词（例如，die Evaluierung，“评估”）和名词不定式（例如，das Evaluieren，“评估”） . 在德语的许多可用事件名词化模式中，我们选择了这两个，因为从语义的角度来看，它们既高效又具有挑战性。众所周知，这两种模式都与基本动词表示的事件保持紧密的关系，但有不同的细微差别。我们的研究旨在更好地理解其语义导入的差异。

我们比较的关键概念是语义透明度，我们提出了基于用法的派生名词及其基础之间关系的表征。使用分布语义学的方法，我们带来了两个具体的透明度度量，它们突出了不同的细微差别：第一个，余弦，检测语义上与其基础相似的名词化；第二个，分布式包容, 检测在基本动词的上下文子集中使用的名词化。我们发现，与传统上考虑的相对频率变量有关，只有包含度量有助于表征两种类型的名词化之间的差异（Hay，2001）。最后，分布分析使我们能够在拐点与推导曲线的更广泛坐标中进行比较。