13. Conversion in English

Conversion is one of the principal ways of forming words in Modern English and it is highly productive. Conversion can be described as a morphological way of forming words. The following indisputable cases of conversion have bееn discussed in linguistic literature: formation of verbs from nouns and more rarely from other parts of speech, and formation of nouns from verbs and rarely from other parts of speech. The two categories of parts of speech especially affected by conversion are nouns and verbs. Verbs made from nouns are the most numerous amongst the words produced by conversion: e. g. to hand, to back, to face, to eye, to mouth, to nose, to dog, to wolf, and very many others. Nouns are frequently made from verbs: do, make, run, find, catch, cut, walk etc. Basic Criteria:The first 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. In cases like pen n — pen v, father n — father v, etc. The second 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; show v — show n; work v — work n, etc. with analogous synonymic word-pairs like occupy — occupation; employ — employment, etc. we are led to conclude that the nouns chat, show, work, etc. are the derived members.

14. Compounding in English

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.Phоnetiсallу compounds are marked by a specific structure of their own.Graphically most compounds have two types of spelling — they are spelt either solidly or with a hyphen. 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.Morphologically compound words are characterised by the specific order and arrangement in which bases follow one another. There are different classifications of compound words: 1From the point of view of degree of semantic independence: coordinative compounds – the two ICs are semantically equally important (oak-tree, girl-friend, Anglo-American); and subordinative compounds - the components are neither structurally nor semantically equal in importance but are based on the domination of the head-member which is, as a rule, the second IC. 2From part of speech they form: compound words are found in all parts of speech, but the bulk of compounds are nouns and adjectives. 3From the point of view of the means by which the components are joined together compound words may be classified into: words formed by merely placing one constituent after another in a definite order; compound words whose ICs are joined together with a special linking-element — the linking vowels [ou] and occasionally [i] and the linking consonant [s/z] — which is indicative of composition as in, e.g., speedometer, tragicomic, statesman; 4) The description of compound words through the correlation with variable word-groups makes it possible to classify them into four major classes: adjectival-nominal (snow-white, age-long, care-free), verbal-nominal (office-management, price-reduction, wage-cut, hand-shake), nominal (windmill, horse-race, pencil-case) and verb-adverb compounds (break-down, runaway, castaway).