Rivalry between French –age and –ée: The Role of Grammatical Aspect in Nominalization

Abstract

This paper will provide an account for the existence of pairs of deverbal nominals with –age and –ée giving rise to event readings. We first study the argument structure of the bases and of the derived nominals, and establish the general tendencies. We further examine the Aktionsart of the nominalizations and of the verbal bases. We conclude that these levels of investigation are not sufficient to determine the proper contribution of the two nominalization patterns and further demonstrate that the relevant contribution they make is at the level of grammatical aspect. We therefore propose that –age introduces the imperfective viewpoint, whereas –ée introduces the perfective viewpoint.

We gratefully thank the audience in the Journée d’étude sur les nominalisations, University of Lille III, june 2009 and in the Séminaire Structure Argumentale et Structure Aspectuelle, University of Paris 8, 26 october 2009. We also thank Fiammetta Namer from the Nancy II University for having provided the corpus, and Dana Cohen for having proofread the manuscript.