Deverbal nouns in -ie and their variation across the South Slavic area

The paper proposes an analysis of the correlation between the semantic and prosodic properties of the suffix -ie and of its variation across the South Slavic languages. Empirical facts about the suffix are outlined, and previous analyses are presented and confronted with empirical and theoretical problems. A slight modification of the analysis of Arsenijević (2010) and Simonović and Arsenijević (2014) enables its combination with the model from Simonović (2019, 2020). The combined analysis neatly accounts for the facts. A model of the variation in the behaviour of the suffix across South Slavic languages is formulated in terms of the modified analysis.