The semantics of eventive suffixes in French

Abstract

This paper examines the properties of three of the suffixes available to create eventive deverbal nouns in French, namely -age, -ment and -ion. The explored hypothesis is that these suffixes have an abstract semantical and aspectual value which contributes to explain why verbs select different suffixes in the operation of nominalisation, as well as the semantical differences between two nominalisations derived from the same verbal base with different suffixes.