The previous sections have shown that the types of deverbal nouns listed in the header of Table 20 differ in the number of verbal features they retain and the number of nominal characteristics they adopt. What all these types have in common is that, despite their verbal basis, they have the distribution of a nominal. Apart from this, each type has adopted more or less nominal characteristics, which makes it possible to rank them according to the degree of verbalness/nominalness they exhibit, with bare-inf nouns exhibiting the highest degree of verbalness and er-nouns exhibiting the highest degree of nominalness.

Bare-inf nouns are clearly the most verbal type; they retain all the verbal characteristics included in the list, while assuming none of the nominal ones. In addition, their reference remains abstract in that they refer to the state of affairs denoted by the input verb. The er-nouns are at the other end of the scale; apart from the fact that they have an argument structure, they are fully nominal in behavior; they are also the only nominalizations that typically denote concrete entities. The other three types of nominalization are ranked in between these two extremes. Interestingly, a higher degree of verbalness seems to correspond to a higher degree of productivity. As we have seen in the previous sections, inf-nominalizations can take virtually any type of verb as input (with the exception of those verbs that do not allow any form of nominalization), while ing and er-nominalizations in particular are much more restricted in this respect.

This concludes our present discussion of nominalization; the different types of nominalization will be discussed further in Section 15.2.3, where we will focus more specifically on their property of inheriting the argument structure of the input verb.