This article explores event nominals in Mēbengokre, a Jê language spoken in the eastern Amazon region in Brazil. On the basis of data from this language, the article argues that event nouns are more basic than the verbs to which they are related, and develops an account of event nominals where a process of nominalization does not play a part. Though it is conceded that derivation from fully-fledged verbs to nouns and from non-eventive nouns to verbs generally exists in language, it is claimed that embedding of categories under other categories is a marked option that is only analytically justified when there is syntactic evidence of grammatical category mixing.
