Verbal nouns in Latin

Abstract

Abstract This chapter investigates properties of verbal nouns in Latin, which usually go under the label of ‘abstract nouns’. It briefly reviews previous research, with a focus on nouns in -tio and -tus. It provides a description of the syntactic and semantic properties of verbal nouns. Verbal nouns show nominal syntax—argument marking is in the genitive—but they retain some verbal properties: they can express or imply their arguments, they can be interpreted for their tense or voice value, and they allow the reflexive pronoun se and the ab phrase expressing the agent. Special attention is paid to the identification of nouns with a verbal meaning and those with a concrete meaning. Collocation or co-occurrence with other constituents in the same clause is an important criterion for this distinction. It is argued that verbal nouns typically occur with verbs meaning existence and happening; concrete nouns with action verbs.