Derivationelle Polysemie, Nominalabstrakta und semantische Kartographie

Denominal abstract nouns belong to the type of non-prototypical derivatives insofar as they involve no change of word-class. In contrast to prototypical, i.e. word-class changing derivational categories, the semantic content of denominal abstract nouns is not related to functional or thematic roles, from which it follows that their semantic development is governed by lexical semantic criteria rather than by criteria affiliated to the semantic structure of predications. Because of the multitude of process types interacting in diachrony, changes in derivational meaning do not lend themselves easily to representation in terms of straightforward models like the semantic maps approach.