Conversion

Lecture 5

Word-building (II)

Outline

Conversion

Word-compounding

Minor ways of word-formation

Conversion

Conversion is one of the basic ways of forming words in Modern English. When two words belonging to different parts of speech are phonetically and graphically identical and semantically related, one of them is said to have been formed by conversion, eg. doctor (n) – doctor (v). This is easily seen in the phrase: Can a doctor doctor a doctor according to his own doctrine of doctoring? (And even better:... according to his own doctoring doctrine?) There are about 14 thousand conversion pairs in Modem English, while some words – home, back and round are the best-known examples – may exhibit as many as 4 or 5 distinct part-of-speech meanings: Come back! (adv), the elephant s back (n) back door (adj), back the car into the garage (v), etc.

Conversion is not perhaps a very happy term, as actually nothing is converted, the new word co-existing with the old one. Other terms have been suggested for the process – zero derivation, root-formation, transposition, functional change – but each of them, too, has its drawbacks. We use conversion simply because it is the most widely accepted term, dating back to 1891 when H. Sweet first used it in his New English Grammar.

Due to the analytical tendencies Modern English displays, the grammatical meaning of a word – including its part-of-speech meaning – tends to depend on the distribution of the word, and on grammar patterns it involves, rather than on the form of the word itself. This makes it possible to define conversion, among other views, as patterned homonymy, stressing the fact that the old and the newly formed words are homonyms, and one can only tell them apart if one notes the difference in paradigm or distribution: doctor – doctor's – doctors for the noun, or doctor – doctors – doctored – doctoring for the verb. Indeed, conversion may be defined as forming a new word by changing its paradigm; but that is putting the cart before the horse, as the change in paradigm is here a result of conversion, not the means of achieving it. It appears only after the conversion has already taken place.

In Modern English, conversion mainly involves monosyllabic root words, usually verbs and nouns, so that noun-verb and verb-noun conversion are the most frequently met cases. In fact, most verbs recently added to the English word-stock are formed by conversion, as to gun for somebody (= be willing to kill him), to gun somebody down (the result of the above), where it combines with post-position – another productive method; or to star (of a film-actor), to orbit (of a satellite), to groove (popular among drug-addicts – Let’s groove). On the other hand, derivatives and compounds can also be converted (e.g. to weekend, to black-list smb), and even adverbs and affixes (e.g. the ups and downs of life, the ins and outs of the plac e, the isms and ologies we used to be taught at the college). The possibility of a noun-adjective and adjective-noun conversion presents a separate problem, as English nouns are regularly used in the syntactical function of attributes and form such close links with the nouns they modify that the whole combination acquires the status of a compound word. The relevant problem is known as the stone wall problem and will be discussed later.

Conversion in English is characterized, apart from syntactical patterns mentioned above, also by semantic patterns – i.e. there are some typical relationships between the meaning of the original word, and the one derived by conversion. If the original word is a noun, the derived verb may imply a typical action associated with it (a nurse – to nurse), an instrumental use (a knife – to knife); addition or modification to the object (a coat – to coat, a fish – to fish), with possible subdivisions of hunting, placing into a container, etc.; deprivation of the object (dust – to dust). If the original word is a verb, the derived noun may imply an instance of the corresponding action (t o drink – a drink), the agent or doer of that action (to help – a help), place of the action (to leak – a leak), object or result of the action (to find – a find).