The Afterlife of a Suffix: Tracing the Development of ‐ Mentum Deverbal Nouns from Latin to Italian

Abstract

The paper examines the emergence of ‐mentum as a deverbal actional suffix in Italian, interpreting it as the result of a broader restructuring of the Latin nominalization system during the transition to the Romance languages. It is put forward that a suffix originally characterized by multiple functions—such as ‐mentum in Latin—eventually developed a unique actional Wortbildungsbedeutung through its paradigmatic association with specific subclasses of verbs. The meaning of these verbs, conceived as an inseparable link between the lexical root and event structure, tends to exclude resultative nominalizations, instead favoring process‐oriented readings. This hypothesis is supported by data from Classical Latin, late Latin, and Italian.