13. Conversion

Conversion is one of the principal ways of forming words in ME and it is highly productive. Conversion consists in making a new word from some existing word by changing the category of a part of speech, the morphemic shape of the original word remaining unchanged. The new word has a meaning which differs from that of the original one though it can more or less be easily associated with it: work — to work; love — to love; paper — to paper.

Conversion can be described as a morphological way of forming words. The treatment of conversion as a morphological way of forming words was suggested by prof. Smirnitsky.

Cases of conversion:

1. formation of verbs from nouns and more rarely from other parts of speech, and

2. formation of nouns from verbs and rarely from other parts of speech.

Basic Criteria: the problem of the criteria of semantic derivation: which of the two words within a conversion pair is the derived member?

The 1^st criterion makes use of the non-correspondence between the lexical meaning of the root-morpheme and the part-of-speech meaning of the stem in one of the two words making up a conversion pair.

The 2^nd criterion involves a comparison of a conversion pair with analogous word-pairs making use of the synonymic sets, of which the words in question are members. For instance, in comparing conversion pairs like chat v — chat n; work v — work n, etc. with analogous synonymic word-pairs like converse — conversation; exhibit — exhibition; occupy — occupation; employ — employment, etc. we are led to conclude that the nouns chat, show, work, etc. are the derived members.

14. Compounding

Compounding: This type of word-building, in which new words are produced by combining two or more stems, is one of the three most productive types in Modern English, the other two are conversion and affixation.

Compounds, on the one hand, are generally clearly distinguished from free word-groups, on the other hand they borderline between them. So there are some criteria which are used to differentiate them: phonetic criterion, semantic and graphic.

• Phоnetiсallу compounds have a specific structure of their own. No phonemic changes of bases occur in composition but the compound word acquires a new stress pattern (‘arm-'chair, ‘grass-'green).

• Graphically most compounds have two types of spelling — daughter-in-law, man-of-war, brother-in-arms.

• Semantically compound words are generally motivated units. The meaning of the compound is first of all derived from the combined lexical meanings of its components.

There are different classifications of compound words:

1. From the point of view of degree of semantic independence: coordinative compounds – the two components are semantically equally important (oak-tree, girl-friend, Anglo-American); and subordinative compounds - the components are not equally important

2. From part of speech they form: compound words are found in all parts of speech, but the majority of compounds are nouns and adjectives.

3. The description of compound words through the correlation with variable word-groups makes it possible to classify them into four major classes: adjectival-nominal (care-free), verbal-nominal (hand-shake), nominal (horse-race) and verb-adverb compounds (break-down, runaway).