Result Nouns

Result nouns are deverbal nouns denoting the object or the state produced by the event expressed by the base verb. Interestingly, many Indo-European languages possess a limited amount or lack altogether dedicated and productive morphological means to form result nouns. The polysemy of deverbal action nouns emerges as an important tool for expressing result objects or states, also in a cross-linguistic perspective. The present article provides the reader with an overview of some influential studies dedicated to the event/result polysemy of action nouns and a brief survey of the morphological, syntactic and interpretive properties of result nouns on the basis of data drawn from European languages (English, German, Swedish, Italian, Russian).