This paper analyses deverbal nominalisations in English, German and French: under special consideration is the -ing-suffixation which appears in all three languages. In German and French, more and more -ing-derived loans have been adopted into the language during the past decades. In both languages, they have developed semantic and morphological properties of their own that overlap or contrast with rival native processes, such as the productive -ung and -en for German, and -age, -(t)ion and -ment for French. I will analyse this evolution especially from a semantic point of view and give reasons why the loan as well as the native forms can co-exist. Moreover, I will discuss the question of how far the -ing-suffixation can be considered an established and transparent word-formation rule for French and German.

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Recent literature on deverbal nominalisations has focused on the aspectual differences between nominal events expressed by the derivational morphology of the noun as well as the problems regarding their interpretation in natural language examples extracted from text corpora (Ehrich and Rapp 2000;Borer 2005;Spranger and Heid 2007;Alexiadou et al. 2009;Heinold 2010). It seems that the close syntactic environment of such event-NPs (like modifiers or embedding verbal constructions) are quite reliable as indicators for their aspectual properties. It is, however, uncertain in how far such contexts as well as the tense and aspect of the sentence interact with the aspectual information within the nominals themselves. This paper shortly introduces the lexical and morphological units in NPs and VPs which carry aspectual information. I present English, German and French data which show that in sentences where nominal and verbal event information interact different levels of aspect have to be kept apart in order to do justice to the subtle semantic differences of complex event situations.