The semantic feature common to picture nouns is that they depict or represent an object and that their denotation is the result of a creative or productive process, as in the case of afbeeldingpicture, schilderijpainting, fotophoto, or beeldstatue. Syntactically, these nouns differ from other dyadic nouns in that they can take two postnominal van-PPs: one referring to the object depicted (henceforth: the theme) and one referring to the creator of this object (henceforth: the agent). In (465a), for example, the PP van Rembrandtby/of Rembrandt refers to the agent and the PP van zijn zoon Titusof his son Titus refers to the theme. This example also shows that the agent cannot be expressed by a door-PP, which is remarkable since in both the verbal and the nominal domain the door-phrase is a typical way of expressing agentivity; the examples in (465b-d) illustrate this for the deverbal nominalizations.

Picture nouns and deverbal nominalizations are similar in that they can express the agent by means of a prenominal genitive noun phrase as well as a possessive pronoun (although this gives a slightly marked result in the case of inf-nominalizations). Examples are given in (466).

Ambiguity may arise from the possibility of assigning the semantic roles of agent and possessor to the van-PP or the prenominal phrase, as shown in (467).

Story nouns are like picture nouns in that they refer to concrete objects resulting from a creative process, but they differ from them in that the object has abstract content. Both of these meaning aspects of story nouns can be modified, which sometimes leads to ambiguity: in (468a) the modifying adjective dikthick, bulky can apply only to the concrete object, in (468b) the modifier interessantinteresting will be taken to apply to some aspect of the book’s content, and in (468c) mooibeautiful can apply either to the physical object or to its content.

The arguments of story nouns, on the other hand, cannot be related to the physical properties of the object in question. As in the case of picture nouns, they refer to the agent or the theme: the examples in (469) show that the former takes the form of a van-PP or a genitive noun phrase/possessive pronoun, and the latter that of an over-PP. Ambiguity may arise from the possibility of assigning the semantic roles of agent and possessor to the van-PP or the prenominal phrase.

As with picture nouns, the agent of story nouns cannot be expressed by a postnominal door-PP, as shown in (470).

The examples in (471a) are possible counterexamples to the claim that the agent of story nouns cannot be expressed by a door-PP. However, it seems plausible that in these cases we are not dealing with true story nouns (i.e. nouns denoting the concrete result of a creative action), but with deverbal nominalizations (i.e. nouns denoting the action expressed by the input verb). This suggestion is supported by the examples in (471b), where the context forces a (concrete) story noun reading of the noun phrases and the door-phrase cannot be used.

We have already seen that story nouns differ from picture nouns in that the theme is not expressed by a van-PP, but by a PP headed by the preposition overabout. The question can be raised whether over is a functional preposition (comparable to functional van) introduced to express the semantic relation between the head noun and its argument, or whether it is inherited from the verb underlying the story noun, as might be the case in the primed examples in (472).

This is an important question since the distinction between story nouns and ing-nominalizations depends on its answer. If the preposition is inherited from the input verb, there is no reason to distinguish a separate class of story nouns: constructions like toespraak overspeech about and vertelling overstory about in (472) would then simply pattern with ing-nominalizations such as jacht ophunt for; cf. Section 16.2.3.3.

An obvious problem with the assumption that the theme PP of the story noun is inherited from an input verb is that it cannot account for the use of the over-PP in examples such as (474), where the story noun is not derived from a verb, but where the relation between the head noun and the theme argument is nevertheless identical to that in example (472). This suggests that the PP is not an inherited argument.

However, it has been suggested that the inheritance approach can be saved by assuming that the over-PP in (474) functions as a complement of the verb rather than as a complement of the noun. This would mean that the primeless examples in (475) do not have the structures shown in the primed examples, but those of the doubly-primed examples (cf. Bach & Horn 1976, Kooij & Wiers 1977, 1978, 1979; Klein & Van der Toorn 1979, and De Haan 1979).

The structures in the doubly-primed examples are certainly plausible: the noun phrases are actually optional. Besides the (a)-examples in (475), it is also possible to have the examples in (476), in which the over-PPs clearly function as complements of the verb.

This does not mean, however, that the structures in the singly-primed examples are excluded. That these structures are also possible is shown by the fact that the PP can be pied-piped under topicalization (constituency test), provided that the indefinite noun phrase is assigned contrastive accent. Furthermore, the examples become perfectly acceptable under a more neutral intonation pattern when the indefinite article is replaced by the definite article hetthe or the demonstrative pronoun ditthis or datthat.

The examples in (478) further show that the two structures can also correspond to a difference in interpretation. If the PP is taken as a complement of the verb, as in (478b), then the ordinal numeral eerstefirst has scope only over boekbook, and the sentence in (478a) expresses that Jan’s first book was about linguistics. However, if the PP is taken as a complement of the noun, as in (478b), then the ordinal numeral eerste has scope over the constituent boek over taalkundebook about linguistics; the sentence thus expresses that Jan has just finished his first book about linguistics, and as a rule it will be concluded (for pragmatic reasons) that the book is not in fact the first book that Jan has written.

Furthermore, only a limited number of verbs allow an analysis with the over-PP as a complement of the verb. For instance, the sentences in example (479) exhibit no structural or interpretational ambiguity due to the fact that the verbs kopento buy and ziento see cannot take a PP-complement headed by over, which is clear from the fact that the noun phrase headed by the story noun cannot be omitted. The over-PPs can therefore only be interpreted as complements of the noun phrase, as in the representations in the primed examples.

These facts show that there is evidence for a separate class of story nouns that take a theme complement in the form of a postnominal over-PP. However, in some constructions there may be ambiguity as to whether the over-PP functions as a complement of the noun or as a complement of the verb; we will return to this issue in more detail in Section 16.2.5.5, sub II, where the function of the over-PP is discussed for a number of different verbs.