Conversion

Question 1

What is conversion?

Answer 1

Conversion is a type of word formation in which there is a change of a word from one lexical category to another without any morphological form marking the change.

Question 2

Productivity and creativity

Answer 2

Conversion is an extremely productive way of word formation. The free change from nouns to verbs and vice versa illustrates the creative aspect of the language. (CATCH THE FISH WITH A SPEAR - SPEAR THE FISH)

Question 3

Constraints on conversion

Answer 3

Conversion is a free process and any lexeme can undergo conversion. But conversion is usually restricted to single morpheme words, and verbs are rarely produced if a word with the intended meaning already exists. There are also constraints on particular subclasses, such as time expressions (holiday, summer etc).

Question 4

Sources of conversion

Answer 4

Nouns and verbs in English have become identical in form firstly as a result of the loss of Old English verbal endings (CARIAN(v) - CARE(v)/ CARU (n) - CARE (n))
A similar homonymy happened with borrowing French words.

Question 5

Types of conversion

Answer 5

There are 5 types of conversion:

1. Between class conversion - when a word changes its natural word class into other open set word classes. Most common are: V from N (to bicycle - bicycle); N from V (a cheat - to cheat); V from A (dry - to dry)
2. Within class conversion - when a word maintains its natural word class but changes its subclass. Nouns can change from MASS to COUNTABLE (SOME BEER - A BEER); COUNTABLE to MASS (A CAKE - SOME CAKE); PROPER to COMMON (PICASSO - A PICASSO). Verbs and adjectives also undergo conversion and change subclass.
3. Minor to major conversion - conversion from a minor word class to a major word class. The rarer a converted lexeme is, the more likely is its meaning to be predictable. There is also major to minor conversion.
4. Full - partial conversion - when a converted word takes on all the features of the new word class, and when it partially takes some of them (for e.g. not inflected for plural, have to be preceded by “the” and take a degree word (very).
5. Marginal conversion - when there are no morphological changes but the base undergoes some type of phonological marginal change, for example, stress shifting (V TO N - CON’VICT - ‘CONVICT)