Specific English grammar question

Futatsu · Post by **Futatsu** » Fri Jun 16, 2006 5:24 am

Hello. Nice to meet you all. I'm new here, and it seems there a lot of skilled teachers here. I have a grammar question. One of my students asked me about when verbs turn into nouns as in the examples below:

narrate ---> narrator / narration

act ---> actor / action

adapt ---> adaptor / adaptation

Please note the "tion" endings. What is this process / phenomena called? Is there a set rule? Thanks!

rusmeister · Post by **rusmeister** » Sat Jun 17, 2006 7:29 am

Everything hinges on your suffix.

"-or" ("-er") is an agent (person or thing that does the action)

"-tion" is the concept or process of the action