Talk:Deverbal noun

"Gerunds and infinitives behave like verbs."
Baloney, gerunds and infinitives "behave like" nouns because they are nouns. (Please tell me how you conjugate a gerund.) In other words, while it can be useful to distinguish between verbal and deverbal nouns, this article is pretty confusing about the distinction.--98.111.164.239 (talk) 15:43, 7 October 2020 (UTC)
 * I agree that the article is baloney. But gerunds and infinitives "behave" both like verbs and like nouns. They are positioned in sentences like nouns are, namely as subjects or variously kinds of objects, but they can take their own objects or adverbs as verbs do. 2001:171B:2274:7C21:71CC:6404:5EA3:9B72 (talk)

Distinction between verbal and deverbal nouns
The section entitled "Distinction between verbal and deverbal nouns" is an unworkable, contradictory mishmash. For example, it is impossible to tell if verbal nouns are the same as gerunds or different, or if verbal nouns are a subclass of deverbal nouns or an alternative. See the "dubious" tags in the section. It is so confusing that even my tags are confused, since there are no clear definitions to hang on to.

The distinction in verbal noun between gerunds and verbal nouns (confusingly also called "gerundial nouns") is useful. 2001:171B:2274:7C21:71CC:6404:5EA3:9B72 (talk) 02:57, 13 June 2022 (UTC)


 * I improved a lot of this, but it still needs work. 2001:171B:2274:7C21:71CC:6404:5EA3:9B72 (talk) 04:11, 13 June 2022 (UTC)

By language
The section "By language" needs to be examined carefully to see whether the distinction between "verbal noun" and "deverbal noun" is really being applied correctly to these other languages. As a prerequisite, there must be a distinction between verbal nouns and deverbal nouns that is valid across languages. The definition in the section "Distinction between verbal and deverbal nouns" is given only for English. (So I renamed that section.) 2001:171B:2274:7C21:71CC:6404:5EA3:9B72 (talk) 03:28, 13 June 2022 (UTC)

Merge or rewrite
I sympathize with the discussions in the sections above. I was struck by the amount of original research, which occupied the great majority of the content. I have incrementally cut back the unsourced portions, leaving brief sections on Hausa, and on French, where the expression fr:nom déverbal appears to be a real thing (although that article has no sources at all, so is in worse shape than ours). It's not so clear to me that this is a thing in English, however. We have the terms verbal noun, gerund, and the concept of "verb nominalization" (which doesn't have its own article, but probably could, as a content split from Nominalization).

The term deverbal noun is claimed as a neologism by grammarian Rodney Huddleston, who put it in quotes and gave a definition of it in his Introduction to the Grammar of English (1984): It does appear to have been picked up since then (books search) although whether in the same sense or not, isn't clear. There are also cases of its being used before 1984 in connection with Arabic, Polish, French, and other languages like Hua language and Kanuri language, although perhaps not in English, which is maybe why Huddleston claimed coinage of it wrt English in 1984.

It seems likely that the topic is notable, although whether it meets the criteria for a stand-alone article is less clear. Perhaps it should start off being merged into Nominalization (or one of the other articles linked above), and then if someone feels like volunteering to scour some of the sources and develop it into a full-blown article, it could be split back out again.

If it remains as a stand-alone article, then it needs a rewrite, as it isn't clear to me what a deverbal noun even is (even after reading Huddleston), or in particular, how it's any different from verbal noun, or any the other terms listed; and if it's only marginally different, or a subset, then it should just be covered at one of those articles. Mathglot (talk) 22:42, 17 April 2023 (UTC)


 * I support a merge (to verbal noun or something similar, but also some of the more general articles). I don't think it's possible to maintain a distinction between verbal noun, deverbal noun, nominalized verb etc. that will make sense in relation to how sources are going to use them for different languages. Besides being tied up to different purposes in different languages, it also depends on the underlying perspectives taking to the status of part-of-speech and derivation etc. (Minor point: I don't see how the quote claims that he coined it; you can describe which terms you are going to use without being the inventor of those terms). Replayful (talk) 18:06, 23 April 2023 (UTC)

Potential direction for the article
There seems to be confusion about what this article is meant to describe. Maybe I can help.

I ended up at this article because I'm searching for a list of examples of how different languages derive nouns from verbs. This does have some overlap with gerunds, but it also describes things like agent nouns (e.g. "baker" from "to bake," "teacher" from "to teach") and Arabic's derived noun forms (see this site for a description).

The page on denominal verbs could potentially serve as a useful example for what this page can do, since the two concepts are essentially mirror images of each other.

Would that give this page a clear enough identity? 161.185.199.20 (talk) 20:14, 15 December 2023 (UTC)