Chomsky’s (1970) Remarks on Nominalization primarily dwelled on the dichotomy between ‘syntactic’ nominalizations like the gerund and the ‘lexical’ ones, which form his class of derived nominals. Interestingly, however, his observation that mixed nominalizations like the ing-of gerund share properties with both classes opened the path to a long-lasting research program on the diversity of nominalizations in terms of how close to or far away from the verbal base they can be in meaning and morphosyntactic behavior (e.g., Grimshaw 1990, Zucchi 1993). In syntax-based theories of word formation such as Distributed Morphology (DM) and the Exo-skeletal Model (XSM), which implement Chomsky’s (1970) thesis for ‘neutral’ category-less ‘lexical entries’ in the shape of acategorial roots, this array of different nominalizations is captured in terms of how much structure these nominals share with their base: it may be just the root (as for Grimshaw’s result nominals), the full event structure of a verb (as in argument structure nominals or Grimshaw’s complex event nominals) or even sentence-like structures such as TPs or CPs (as in English gerunds or Spanish infinitives; see Alexiadou et al 2011, Borer 2013 for overviews and references). It is the mixture between the first two types of derived nominals that interests me here, as exemplified by zero-derived nouns (ZNs), and I will show how the root ontology of the base verb influences the possibility of ZNs to nominalize either roots or verbal event structure, just like suffix-based nominals.