INTRODUCTORY REMARKS

The process of coining a new word in a different part of speech and with a different distribution characteristic but without adding any de­rivative element, so that the basic form of the original and the basic form of the derived words are homonymous, is variously called con­version, zero derivation, root formation, transposition or functional change.

The essence of the phenomenon may be illustrated by the following example: His voice silenced everyone else (Snow). The word silence ex­ists in the English language as a noun, and a verb may be formed from the same stem without adding any affix or without changing the stem in any other way, so that both basic forms are homonymous. Their dis­tribution on the other hand is quite different. In our example silence not only takes the functional verbal suffix -ed but occupies the position of a verbal predicate having voice as a subject and everyone else as its object. Its lexico-grammatical meaning is also that of a verb. The dif­ference between silence n and silence v is morphological, syntactic and semantic: the original and the resulting word are grammatically differ­ent; a new paradigm is acquired and the syntactic functions and ties are those of a verb. Compare also: silence one's critics; silence enemy guns.

The term basicformas used in the above definition means the word form in which the notion denoted is expressed in the most abstract way. For nouns it is the Common case singular, for verbs, the Infinitive.

Each of the five terms given above for the type of the word-formation process itself, i.e. conversion, zero derivation, root formation, transpo­sition or functional change, has its drawbacks.

The term conversion is in a way misleading as actually noth­ing is converted: the original word continues its existence alongside the new one. As to zero derivation, it does not permit us to distinguish this type from sound interchange (food n — feed v) where no derivative morpheme is addecj either. The term root formation is not always suitable as the process can involve not only root words, but also words containing affixes and compounds (as was the case with the word silence above; compare also audition v, featherbed v). The terms functional change or transposition imply that the process in question concerns usage, not word-formation. This immediate­ly brings us into an extremely controversial field. Accepting the term functional change one must admit that one and the same word

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can belong to several parts of speech simultaneously. The majority of the Soviet linguists are convinced of the impossibility of a word belong­ing at the same time to several parts of speech, because this contradicts the basic definition of a word as a system of forms.¹ In what follows the term conversion will be used in preference to the other four, because in spite of its deficiencies it is more widely accepted to denote this word-forming process.

As a type of word-formation, conversion exists in many languages. "What is specific for the English vocabulary is not its mere presence, but its intense development.

The study of conversion in present-day English is of great theoret­ical interest, as nowhere, perhaps, are the interdependence of vocabu­lary and grammar and the systematic character of language so obviously displayed. Studying it, one sees the dependence of word-building types on the character of word structure already frequent in the language.

The main reason for the widespread development of conversion in present-day English is no doubt the absence of morphological elements serving as classifying signals, or, in other words, of formal signs marking the part of speech to which the word belongs. The fact that the sound pattern does not show to what part of speech the word belongs may be illustrated by the following table.

Many affixes are homonymous and therefore the general sound pat­tern does not contain any information as to the possible part of speech. Compare:

Compare also such homophones as Finnish a and finish v; principle n and principal a and n.

¹ This definition is not flawless, especially as the existing classifications into parts of speech do not seem to satisfy anybody.

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§ 8.2 THE HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT OF CONVERSION

The problem of conversion may prove a pitfall because of possible confusion of the synchronic and diachronic approach- Although the im­portance of conversion has long been recognized, and the causes that foster it seem to have been extensively studied, the synchronic research of its effect in developing a special type of patterned homonymy in the English vocabulary system has been somewhat disregarded until the last decade.

This patterned homonymy, in which words belonging to dif­ferent parts of speech differ in their lexico-grammatical meaning but pos­sess an invariant component in their lexical meanings, so that the meaning of the derived component of the homonymous pair form a subset of the meaning of the prototype, will be further discussed in the chapter on homonymy.

The causes that made conversion so widely spread are to be ap­proached diachronically.¹ Nouns and verbs have become identical in form firsth as a result of the loss of endings. More rarely it is the prefix that is dropped: mind < OE zemynd.

When endings have disappeared phonetical development resulted in the merging of sound forms for both elements of these pairs.

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