The nominalizing suffix -ing derives three types of nominal in English: result nominals, event nominals and verbal gerunds. Following Emonds’ (2000, 2005) theory of multi-level insertion, this paper focuses on the difference that results from pre-PF nominalization on the one hand and PF-nominalization on the other. Pre-PF nominalization targets the head of a phrase, which derives either a result or event nominal, while PF nominalization targets an entire phrase, which derives a verbal gerund with a VP-internal structure. The multi-level nominalization analysis receives crosslinguistic support from Japanese verbal nouns that are required to undergo nominalization by the merger with a null nominalizing suffix.