Many deverbal nouns in French which denote a creation process are lexically ambiguous between a processive and a resultative reading. They denote the same process as the verb they derive from or they denote the result of this process. The first question we would like to answer concerns the kind of lexical ambiguity which may characterize them. But this question is close to the conceptual category which ambiguous deverbal nouns are supposed to denote. These two related questions will be first studied on the basis of linguistic properties of deverbal action nouns with regards to argumental structure and aspectual category. The result of this study is then compared with tests by Cruse (among others). These tests are devoted to the construction of a classification of lexical ambiguity which is based on linguistic tests. We will defend a polysemic point of view for ambiguous deverbal action nouns in French.