In the morphosyntactic literature, there exist two approaches to the problem of argument structure in English nominal synthetic compounds such as furniture moving or dog training. According to Borer (2012), such synthetic compounds belong to the class of referential nominals and thus lack argument structure. On the other hand, Alexiadou (2017) maintains that the external argument is present in the structure of synthetic compounds due to their ability to co-occur with by-phrases. In this paper, we present an extensive set of corpus data to show that synthetic -ing compounds do project the external argument, which is evidenced by their ability to license not only by-phrases but also agent-oriented adjectives and instrumental phrases. Importantly, the corpus data indicates that certain synthetic -ing compounds display the capacity to occur in aspectual contexts; nominal compounds fall in two classes in that regard.