Nouns and verbs are generally viewed as discrete categories, yet many instances defy categorization. Deverbal nominalizations straddle the middle, simultaneously construing object/event-oriented meanings. Such nominalizations are strongly associated with grammatical metaphor (GM) in systemic functional linguistics (SFL) but this relationship remains elusive. This paper evaluates congruence and construal, which underlie GM. It aims to develop an empirical approach to these concepts that goes beyond our intuitions. We analyse the 10 most frequent noun-verb pairs in French and English (e.g. work-work/travail-travailler) from SketchEngine’s frTenTen12 and enTenTen13 corpora (Kilgariff et al 2014). The analysis includes frequency distribution and noun/verb typology (e.g. lexical aspect) to determine whether there any evidence for a lexical semantic base that seems to operate beyond word class (cf. Halliday’s (1961:277) insight that “the ‘lexical item,’ is unrestricted grammatically”). Huyghe et al (2017:132) have shown that lexical aspect also applies to nouns, concluding that aspect “is a matter of semantic rather than grammatical categories”. The implications of this are significant. Our methodology establishes a comparative framework for determining the nature and distribution of nominals, providing a frame of reference for critically examining the assumptions surrounding the notions of construal and congruence within SFL at word rank.