ABSTRACT
The behaviour of adverbials is clearly significant in the syntax of nominalisations: but to bring it in as a criterion of nominalisation status would be to define the less obscure in terms of the more obscure. Perhaps the most straightforward semantic distinct ion to make is between those nominalisations which are capable of referring to entities of some sort and those which are not. Among nominalisations expressing abstract notions, there are some further distinctions of meaning which are fairly subtle, but which are quite important. Two types of factor influence possible interpretations - the inherent nature of the nominalisation and the external syntactic or semantic context in which it occurs. Attempts have occasionally been made to find a purely formal basis on which to differentiate the different suffixes used for nominalisations, but these attempts have been almost uniformly unsuccessful.
