Semantic relations in conversion

There are some patterned re­lationships in conversion.

1) The lexical meaning of the verb points out the instrument, the agent, the place, the cause, the result and time of action.

Verbs based on nouns denoting some part of the human body will show a regularity of instrumental meaning, e. g. to eye – “to watch carefully (with eyes)”; to finger – “to touch with the fingers”; to hand – “to give or help with the hand”; to elbow – “to push or force one's way with the elbows”.

The same type of instrumental relations will be noted in stems denot­ing various tools, machines and weapons: to hammer, to knife, to ma­chine-gun, to pivot, to pump, to sandpaper, to saw, to spur.

Sometimes the noun names the agent of the action expressed in the verb, the action being characteristic of what is named by the noun: to crowd – “to come together in large numbers”, to flock – “to gather in flocks”.

The group of verbs based on the names of animals may be called meta­phorical, as their meaning implies comparison. e.g. to dog – “to follow close behind as a dog does”, to monkey – “mimick, to wolf (down) – “ to eat quickly”.

Resultative relations can be found with the formulas: “to hunt some animal' and 'to give birth to some animal”, e.g. to fox, to rabbit, to rat.

With nouns denoting places, buildings, containers and the like the meaning of the converted verb will be locative: to bag – “to put in a bag”, to bottle – “to store in bottles”, to can – “ to put into cans”, to corner – “to set in a corner”.

Verbs with adjective stems, such as to blind, to calm, to clean, to empty show regular semantic relationships with the corres­ponding adjectives.

2) Deverbal nouns formed by conversion fall mostly under the categories of process, result, place or agent, e.g. the name the process, the act or a specific instance of what the verbal stem expresses: to go- go; to hiss –hiss; to hunt-hunt;the result or the object of the verbal action is denoted in such nouns as burn, catch, cut, find, lift, offer, tear. The place of action is named by the nouns drive, stand, walk etc.

H. Marchand points out that the deverbal personal nouns formed by means of conversion and denoting the doer are mostly derogatory, e.g. scold – “a scolding woman”, tease – “a person who teases”. It shows that the language has some pat­terned morphological ways to convey emotional meaning; these ways can form a parallel to the suffixes denoting deprecation, such as -ard, -ster. Such words often display emotional colouring, give a jocular ring to the utterance or sound as colloquialisms: "Don't bossy me”.

Conversion and other types of word-formation

The flexibility of the English vocabulary system makes a word formed by conversion capable of further derivation. It takes not only functional but also derivational af­fixes characteristic of a verbal stem, and becomes distributionally equiv­alent to it: to view – “to watch television” gives: unviewable, viewer, viewing.

Conversion may be combined with other word-building processes, e.g. composition :to blacklist., to stonewall;nonce-words can be also formed: to my-dear, to my-love, to blue-pencil.

There is a special very productive pattern is a combined effect of composition and conversion. It forms nouns out of phrasal verbs. The noun stem obtains phonetical and graphical integrity and indivisibility absent in the verb-group, because of solid or hyphenated spelling and single stress e.g. to draw back - a drawback, look-out, lookout, make-up – makeup.

Partial conversion

There is a kind of double process when first a noun is formed by conversion from a verbal stem, and then it is combined with such verbs as give, make, have, take and others to form a verbal phrase with a special aspect characteristic, e.g. have a wash, a chat, a swim; to give a smoke, a look; give a laugh, a cry.

There many idiomatic prepositional phrases: be in the know, in the long run, of English make, get into a scrape.

Substantivation

There is another way of word-formation that raises many questions about its belonging to conversion. It is called substantivation, e,g. a private, the private's uniform, a group of privates, captive, conser­vative, criminal.

Some scholars do not accept substantivation of adjectives as a variant of conversion, considering conversion as a process limited to the formation of verbs from nouns and nouns from verbs. Some scholars, among them O.Jespersen consider it to be conversion as a word receives a syntactic function which is not its basic one.

L. P. Vinokurova, I. P. Ivanova and others maintain that substantiation in which adjectives have the paradigm and syntac­tic features of nouns differs from conversion, as in substantlvation a new word arises not spontaneously but gradually, so that a word already existing in the language by and by acquires a new syntactic function and changes its meaning as a result of a gradual process of isolation.In plain words a word combination loses a weak noun. Other scoars disagree and say the coining of a new word is at first nothing but a fact of contextual usage, no matter of it is conversion or substantivation. The pro­cess of conversion is impossible outside a context. No isolated word can ever be formed by conversion.

L. P. Vinokurova distinguishes two main types of substantivation:

(1) it may be the outcome of ellipsis in an attributive phrase, e.g. the elastic (cord), or (2) it may be due to an unusual syntactic functioning: e.g. I am a contemplative, one of the impossibles.

The degree of substantivation may be different. Alongside with complete substantivation: the private, the private's, the privates, there exists partial substantivation. In this last case a substantivized adjective or participle denotes a group or a class of people: the blind, the dead, the English, the poor, the rich. Such words are called partially substantivized because they undergo no morphological changes, do not acquire a new paradigm and are only used with the definite article and a collective meaning. Besides they keep some properties of adjectives: e.g. the can be modifled by adverbs.

Besides the substantivized adjectives denoting human beings there are abstract nouns, often grammatical terms: the Singular, the Plural, the Present.

LECTURE VII.