Second edition

§ 20. Diachronic Approach of Conversion. Origin

Modern English vocabulary is exceedingly rich in conversion pairs. As a way of forming words conversion is extremely productive and new conversion pairs make their appearance in fiction, newspaper articles and in the process of oral communication in all spheres of human activity gradually forcing their way into the existing vocabulary and into the dictionaries as well. New conversion pairs are created on the analogy of those already in the word-stock on the semantic patterns described above as types of semantic relations. Conversion is highly productive in the formation of verbs, especially from compound nouns. 20th century new words include a great many verbs formed by conversion, e.g. to motor — ‘travel by car’; to phone — ‘use the telephone’; to wire — ’send a telegram’; to microfilm — ‘produce a microfilm of; to tear-gas — ‘to use tear-gas’; to fire-bomb — ‘drop fire-bombs’; to spearhead — ‘act as a spearhead for’; to blueprint — ‘work out, outline’, etc. A diachronic survey of the present-day stock of conversion pairs reveals, however, that not all of them have been created on the semantic patterns just referred to. Some of them arose as a result of the disappear-
¹ See П. А. Соболева. О трансформационном анализе словообразовательных отношений. — Сб. Трансформационный метод в структурной лингвистике. М., 1964.
² See ‘Methods and Procedures of Lexicological Analysis’, § 5, p. 251. ³ The sign -> shows the possibility of transformation.
⁴ The sign -> denotes the impossibility of transformation.
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ance of inflections in the course of the historical development of the English language due to which two words of different parts of speech, e.g. a verb and a noun, coincided in pronunciation. This is the case with such word-pairs, for instance, as love n (OE. lufu) — love v (OE. lufian); work n (OE. wēōrc) — work v (OE. wyrcan); answer n (OE. andswaru) — answer v (OE. andswarian) and many others. For this reason certain linguists consider it necessary to distinguish between homonymous word-pairs which appeared as a result of the loss of inflections and those formed by conversion. The term conversion is applied then only to cases like doctor n — doctor v; brief a — brief v that came into being after the disappearance of inflections, word-pairs like work n — work v being regarded exclusively as cases of homonymy.¹
Other linguists share Prof. Smirnitsky’s views concerning discrimination between conversion as a derivational means and as a type of word-building relations between words in Modern English. Synchronically in Modern English there is no difference at all between cases like taxi n — taxi v and cases like love n — love v from the point of view of their morphological structure and the word-building system of the language. In either case the only difference between the two words is that of the paradigm: the historical background is here irrelevant. It should be emphatically stressed at this point that the present-day derivative correlations within conversion pairs do not necessarily coincide with the etymological relationship. For instance, in the word-pair awe n — awe v the noun is the source, of derivation both diachronically and synchronically, but it is quite different with the pair mould v — mould n: historically the verb is the derived member, whereas it is the other way round from the angle of Modern English (cf. the derivatives mouldable, moulding, moulder which have suffixes added to verb-bases).
A diachronic semantic analysis of a conversion pair reveals that in the course of time the semantic structure of the base may acquire a new meaning or several meanings under the influence of the meanings of the converted word. This semantic process has been termed reconversion in linguistic literature.² There is an essential difference between conversion and reconversion: being a way of forming words conversion leads to a numerical enlargement of the English vocabulary, whereas reconversion only brings about a new meaning correlated with one of the meanings of the converted word. Research has shown that reconversion
¹ Because of the regular character of semantic correlation within such word-pairs as well as within conversion pairs formed on the semantic patterns I. P. Ivanova intro-
duces the notion of patterned homonymy. She points out that conversion is one of the sources of homonymy, there are also other sources such as coincidence in sound-form of words of different parts of speech, borrowing two words of different parts of speech in the same phonetic shape, and some others. (See И. П. Иванова. О морфологической характеристике слова в современном английском языке. — Сб. : Проблемы морфологического строя германских языков. М., 1963; see also I. Arnold. The English Word. M., 1973, ch. VIII.)
² See П. М. Каращук. Реконверсия и ее роль в развитии семантических структур соотносящихся по конверсии слов. — Сб. “Словообразование и его место в курсе обучения иностранному языку”, вып. I. Владивосток, 1973.