Attenders or attendees? Deverbal -ee and -er variants in English

This paper presents a qualitative corpus analysis of deverbal -ee and -er pairs with agentive, human reference (e.g. escaper-escapee; attender-attendee) as they occur in natural discourse. It is argued that pairs like these are not synonymous or idiosyncratic formations, but represent systematic instantiations of their respective systems of nominalization whose distinct meanings can be traced back to that of the overall system which they belong to: the -er nouns typically foreground the active, dynamic perspective of -er derivation, focusing on the agent's ability, potential or intention to carry out an action, or on the regularity with which it is carried out; their counterparts in -ee, on the other hand, zoom in on the state that the agents find themselves in as a result of performing a certain process.