On comparative study of deverbal nominalizations denoting process and result in Lithuanian and English

Although the Lithuanian and English languages are bound within the family of IndoEuropean languages, the typological differences between the two languages lie in the system of inflectional and derivational morphology. The paper analyses the concept of nominalization and discusses the deverbal process and result nominalizations in Lithuanian and English. For the comparative qualitative and quantitative analysis, 965 equivalents of deverbal nouns have been selected from the “Parallel Corpus”. Out of them, 802 examples belong to the category of deverbal process nouns, whilst the category of deverbal result nouns includes 163 examples. From the point of view of morphology, in both languages nominalization is a word-formation process by which a noun is derived from a verb, adjective or another noun, or even other parts of speech, usually through suffixation and by adding the ending in the Lithuanian language. Two types of nominalization can be found across languages: lexical and syntactic. Lexical nominalization refers to the formation of deverbal nouns or nominal words derived from the verb or a nominal word, and syntactic nominalization refers to turning a clause into a noun phrase. In summary, the investigation of the derivational affixes of deverbal nouns in Lithuanian and their equivalents in English has revealed the following differences: in Lithuanian, the deverbal nominalizations – deverbal process nouns and deverbal result nouns – can be formed with 132 suffixes and 5 endings, whilst in English – with 10 suffixes and by employing the derivational strategy of conversion. Also, the analysis of the empirical material revealed that the suffix -imas/-ymas in Lithuanian prevails in forming deverbal process nouns (they make 73 per cent of all deverbal process nouns), while the suffix -inys is the most prolific in forming deverbal result nouns (they make 38 per cent of all deverbal result nouns). The English equivalents usually have the suffix -ion/-tion/-sion/-ation, quite many derivatives have the suffix -ing. It should be noted that deverbal nominalizations in the Lithuanian language often correlate with abstract and concrete nouns (non-derivatives) in the English language: 23 per cent of all derivatives in Lithuanian have more than one equivalent (derivative or non-derivative) in English.