Branches of linguistics. Synchronic vs diachronic approaches to the language study. Lexicology – ‘the science of the word’ Lexicon

Criteria for establishing the directionality of conversion:

historical, e.g. crowd, v (O.E. crudan ‘to press, to hasten, to drive’, 937 AD) > crowd, n ‘a compressed mass of people or things’ 16th c. > ‘any mass of people’;

semantic, i.e. the converted word should be semantically more complex than the base word from which it is derived or is semantically dependent on the latter, e.g. bottle, n > bottle, v; better, adj – better, v;

morphological, i.e. in a homonymous verb-noun pair, the regularly inflected form is derived from the irregularly inflected one, e.g. drink, v > drink, n; sleep, v > sleep, n;

phonetic, i.e. in a homonymous verb-noun pair a stress-shift indicates a derived word, e.g. extráct, v – éxtract, n; pùsh úp, v - púsh-up, n;