liaafriani

In linguistics, conversion, also called zero derivation, is a kind of word formation involving the creation of a word (of a new word class) from an existing word (of a different word class) without any change in form,^[1] which is to say, derivation using only zero. For example, the noun green in golf (referring to a putting-green) is derived ultimately from the adjective green.

Conversions from adjectives to nouns and vice versa are both very common and unnotable in English; much more remarked upon is the creation of a verb by converting a noun or other word (e.g., the adjective clean becomes the verb to clean).

Conversion or Functional Shift
In addition to affixation and compounding, there is another major word-formations process, namely conversion. "By Conversion we understand derivation of a new lexeme from an existing one without a specific morphological marker indicating the change of word class and meaning."(Kortmann 2005, 103)

As Kortmann points out, the word itself does not change although it shifts into another word category and therefore experiences a change of meaning. Due to this apparent lack of change, linguistis also refer to conversion as zero derivation.
The most productive form of conversion occurs within the three following word-class changes:

1. noun > verb
   • e.g. butter, google, mail, ship
2. adjective > verb
   • e.g. better, clean, empty, open
3. verb > noun
   • e.g. desire, guess, love, smell

Conversion is commonly subsumed under the category of non-concatentative word-formation processes as new items are formed without any sort of affixation or any discernible modification of the base.


Typology

There are many cases in which the process of conversion is evident. Nevertheless, conversion is not as simple as it may seem: the process is easily recognisable because both words are graphically identical; the direction of this process, though, is sometimes nearly impossible to determine.

This is not very important for the speaker: he just needs a simple way to cover a gap in the language. As this paper tries to give a comprehensive vision on conversion, it will attempt to establish the direction of the process. Therefore, both the original category and the derived one will be mentioned.
The criterion to establish the original and derived item has been taken from Marchand (1972: 242-252). It focuses on several aspects:

1. the semantic dependence (the word that reports to the meaning of the other is the derivative)
    
2. the range of usage (the item with the smaller range of use is the converted word),
    
3. the semantic range (the one with less semantic fields is the shifted item)
    
4. and the phonetic shape (some suffixes express the word-class the item belongs to and, if it does not fit, this is the derivative).
    

After this analysis, intuition is still important. Verbs tend to be abstract because they represent actions and nouns are frequently concrete because they name material entities. Conversion is quickly related to shift of word-class. With this respect, it mainly produces nouns, verbs and adjectives. The major cases of conversion are from noun to verb and from verb to noun. Conversion from adjective to verb is also common, but it has a lower ratio. Other grammatical categories, including closed-class ones, can only shift to open-class categories, but not to closed-class ones (prepositions, conjunctions). In addition, it is not rare that a simple word shifts into more than one category.


Partial conversion

Conversion from noun to adjective and adjective to noun is rather a controversial one. It is called 'partial conversion" by Quirk (1997: 1559) and Cannon (1985: 413) and 'syntactic process' by Bauer (1983: 230). This peculiar process occurs when "a word of one class appears in a function which is characteristic of another word class" (Quirk, 1997: 1559). Most of these cases should not be treated as conversion but as nouns functioning as adjectives and vice versa.


Conversion within secondary word classes

Up to this point conversion has only been considered as a shift from one grammatical category to another. However, these are not the only cases where it may happen. "The notion of conversion may be extended to changes of secondary word class, within the same major word category" (Quirk, 1997: 1563). This process has no clear terminology; for example it is called 'change of secondary word class' by Quirk (1997: 1563) and 'conversion as a syntactic process' by Bauer (1983: 227). Within the field of conversion, it has not been much studied because it is less evident than the classical conversion. Some scholars argue that these cases are products of syntactic processes, and so, they may not be considered as part of word-formation (they shift within the same grammatical category but not to a different one) (Bauer, 1983: 227).








 references
http://translationjournal.net/journal/31conversion.htm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conversion_%28word_formation%29
http://www.ello.uos.de/field.php/Morphology/ConversionOrFunctionalShift