Edited by Michela Cennamo and Claudia Fabrizio
[Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 348] 2019
► pp. 115–132
Although German ung- and English ing-nouns developed from a common Germanic origin, the two nominalization types exhibit surprisingly different aspectual and countability properties in present-day German and present-day English. Diachronically, one of the most prominent differences between the two languages is the loss of grammatical gender as a marker of countability in English versus its re-grammaticalization in the form of derivational suffixes in German. In this paper, we show how this particular difference explains the unexpected development of ing, which, instead of specializing for result-oriented countable readings of the deverbal nominal, like ung did, came to specialize for process-oriented uncountable/mass denotations of events. The paper discusses the influence of gender on ung/ing-nominals, its particular morphosyntactic consequences, and its implications for present-day differences between the two languages.