What is it about?
Deverbal nominalizations in Russian inherit the presence of the aspectual morphological marks of the base verb from which the nominalization derives. The main focus of this paper is to analyze to what extent the morphological and the lexical aspect of the base verb determines the lexical denotation of its corresponding nominalization, in our case its denotation as an event, as a result or as a state. The initial hypothesis of our research is that it is not possible to say that morphological and lexical aspect of the base verb determines the lexical denotation of the deverbal noun, although it seems that both have significant influence on the lexical aspect of the nominal. In order to examine these hypotheses we proceed as follows. (a) First, we analyze the different types of nominalizations on the basis of the traditional verbal classification into aspectual paired, biaspectual and uniaspectual verbs. The result of this analysis is a deverbal nominalization classification, which enables us to determine from which class of verb the nominalization is derived and whether the nominalization has inherited morphological aspectual marks –either imperfective or perfective- from the corresponding verb. (b) Second, we analyze each type of nominalization in examples from real data in order to establish their denotation or lexical aspect (i.e., event, result or state). The main two goals in doing this analysis are the following: first, to determine the influence of the morphological aspect of the base verb on the lexical denotation of the nominalization, and, second, to determine the influence of the lexical aspect of the base verb on the lexical denotation of the deverbal noun. The intent of this research is to understand more deeply the relationship established between the nominalization and its base verb.