This paper describes the results of a study on the semantics of socalled support-verb-nominalization (SVN) pairs in English.
These constructions consist of a semantically impoverished verb and a complement nominalization sharing an unexpressed role
with the verb. The study builds on the results of Davis and Barrett (2001), where it was argued that the semantic roles of
the support-verb have a compatibility constraint with respect to the roles present in the nominalization. The results of the
present study point to additional constraints based upon the Aktionsart category of both the support-verb and the verb from
which the nominalization is derived.