Summary:The paper deals with the derivational category of ‘action nouns’ both as a subject of general linguistics and as a problem of Indo-European morphology (primarily in the diachrony of Latin but also from the perspective of comparative philology). First of all, I elucidate the concepts used in the analysis of verbal abstracts – above all their well renowned definition by Walter Porzig as “Namen für Satzinhalte”. Subsequently, I interpret some passages occurring in comedies of Plautus and epigraphic documents of Old Latin illustrating the diachronic developments by accounting for some construction patterns under consideration of their ‘suprasyntactic’ aspects. In the paragraphs following, I discuss a variety of IE actional types (including the genesis of infinitives), also taking care of some significant relics of verbal constructions in Ancient Greek.The implication scale of increasing ‘concretization’, which I proposed and utilized in my studies so far, exhibits a development from action via the steps: result, instrument, location leading to (collective) agents. This thesis may also be corroborated by a number of Latin testimonies.According to my concept of correlation between frequency of nomina actionis and nomina acti on the one hand and the corresponding text type on the other, I present a number of examples taken from the authors Vitruvius, Frontinus, Petronius, Juvenalis, Justinus and Dares Phrygius. I describe and interpret them by means of qualitative criteria and quantitative parameters such as occurrence, semantic profile and competition in relation to alternative derivational types that employ cognate stems and affixes.