Transitivity of deverbal nominals and aspectual modifiers of the verbal stem (evidence from Russian)

This paper deals with transitivity in the domain of deverbal nouns in Russian and discusses possible correlations among transitivity and morphosyntactic properties of the verbal stems the nominals can be derived from. It presents another answer to the question of how various deverbal noun suffixes in a language may differ from one another, and what the reasons for these differences are. The two classes of differences discussed in this paper, namely, transitivity preferences and the ability to attach to only prefixed stems vs. to suffixed as well as prefixed stems are claimed to be manifestations of one and the same parameter that determines the place of attachment and thus makes a clear-cut distinction between early-attaching and late-attaching deverbal noun suffixes.