§ 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.

Oe ModE

carian v

cam n ^{care v}' ⁿ

drincan v

drinca, drinc n ^{drmk v}- ⁿ

slsepan v

step, slep n ^{Sleep V}* ⁿ

A similar homonymy resulted in the borrowing from French of nu­merous pairs of words of the same root but belonging in French to dif­ferent parts of speech. These words lost their affixes and became phone-ticalh identical in the process of assimilation.

OFr ModE

eschequier v

eschec n check² v, n

crier v

cri n cry v,n

Prof A.I. Smirnitsky is of the opinion that on a synchronic level there is no difference in correlation between such cases as listed above, i.e.

¹See: JespersenO. English Grammar on Historical Principles. Pt. VI.

² The etymology of the word is curious from another point of view as well. Eschequier (OFr) means 'to play chess'. It comes into Old French through Arabic from Persian shak 'king*. In that game one must call "Check*." on putting one's opponent's king in danger. Hence the meaning of 'holding someone in check'; check also means 'suddenly arrest motion of and 'restrain*. Both the noun and the verb are polysemantic in Modern English.

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words originally differentiated by affixes and later becoming homonym-ous after the loss of endings {sleep v : : sleep n) and those formed by conversion (pencil n : : pencil v). He argues that to separate these cases would mean substituting-the description of the present state of things by the description of its sources.¹ He is quite right in pointing out the identity of both cases considered synchronically. His mistake lies in the wish to call both cases conversion, which is illogical if this scholar accepts the definition of conversion as a word-building oprcess which implies the diachronic approach. So actually it is Prof. A.I. Smirnitsky's own suggestion that leads to a confusion of synchronic and diachronic methods of analysis.

Conversion is a type of word-building — not a pattern of struc­tural relationship. On the other hand, this latter is of paramount impor­tance and interest. Synchronically both types sleep n : : sleep v and pencil n : : pencil v must be treated together as cases of patterned ho-monymy.² But it is essential to differentiate the cases of conversion and treat them separately when the study is diachronic.