  We propose a lexical account of action nominals, in particular of deverbal
nominalisations, whose meaning is related to the event expressed by their base
verb. The literature about nominalisations often assumes that the semantics of
the base verb completely defines the structure of action nominals. We argue
that the information in the base verb is not sufficient to completely determine
the semantics of action nominals. We exhibit some data from different
languages, especially from Romance language, which show that nominalisations
focus on some aspects of the verb semantics. The selected aspects, however,
seem to be idiosyncratic and do not automatically result from the internal
structure of the verb nor from its interaction with the morphological suffix.
We therefore propose a partially lexicalist approach view of deverbal nouns. It
is made precise and computable by using the Montagovian Generative Lexicon, a
type theoretical framework introduced by Bassac, Mery and Retor\'e in this
journal in 2010. This extension of Montague semantics with a richer type system
easily incorporates lexical phenomena like the semantics of action nominals in
particular deverbals, including their polysemy and (in)felicitous
copredications.
