Latin verbal nouns in -tio: interpretations and selection restrictions

Abstract

This paper focuses on Latin verbal nouns in -tio and its main aims are as follows: (i) to determine what types of nouns are formed using this suffix and (ii) to establish the semantic/aspectual restrictions that operate in this derivational process. The first section discusses the aims of the study and establishes the principal assumptions upon which it is based. The second part of the paper describes and exemplifies the five interpretations of verbal nouns in -tio within the corpus studied. In the third section, I analyse the bases of these verbal nouns according to their Dynamism, Control, Duration and Telicity, that is, the most important features of the aspectual typologies proposed by Vendler (1957) and Dik (19972).