Competition Between Event-Denoting Deverbal Nouns and Nominal Infinitives in Italian

In Italian, nominal infinitives (“infinito sostantivato”, e.g. Il partire, rendered in English as gerunds: ‘the leaving’) are commonly used as verb arguments alongside deverbal nouns (formed by means of suffixes such as -ione, -mento, -aggio, -nza, e.g. la partenza ‘the departure’). Both nominalization strategies seem to denote eventualities, and in some cases both are widely used, raising the question of how their meanings differ or whether there could be semantic competition among them. The paper uses corpus-based methods to study the distribution of these forms, with the aim of understanding the rationale behind the choice of one morphological process rather than the other. We found out that when both derivatives are built from the same base they frequently bring out distinct verb meanings, often one more concrete, the other more abstract, as it emerges from the different types of complements the two forms tend to select.