Two questions on ELL.SE, one involving the word division and the other about the word implementation, made me realize that I treat these words differently without really understanding the grammatical reason.
The first question from ELL is about the use of conceptually in this definition from the Oxford Dictionary of English:
dualism = {mass noun} 1. The division of something conceptually into two opposed or contrasted aspects, or the state of being so divided
Division looks like a noun that would need an adjective like conceptual to describe it, but here we are using an adverb. I intuitively feel like that's OK for this particular word, where it isn't OK for a noun like book.
The second question from ELL is about the lack of an article in front of implementation in this sentence:
Tusk said the EU would go ahead anyway with new sanctions against 19 Russian and Ukrainian individuals and nine entities next week, despite having agreed on Monday to suspend implementation for a week to boost the chances of success of the Minsk talks.
Intuitively, I think it's fine to say either "suspend the implementation" or "suspend implementation", but again, I'm unsure of my grammatical footing here.
In the second question, the asker thought that if you could substitute a related gerund form into the sentence and it still made sense grammatically, the original word might follow some special set of grammar rules. It seems to me that the Latin suffix ‑ion (denoting action or condition) is the key feature of these words.
Do these words that can be both an action and a state or condition actually have special treatment grammatically, or has common usage made some grammatically incorrect usages seem OK?
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