English Words

4.4.2
Conversion
In English very often lexical items are created not by affixation but by CONVERSION or ZERO
DERIVATION, i.e. without any alteration being made to the shape of the input base. The word-form
remains the same, but it realises a different lexical item.
Conversion of verbs into nouns and nouns into verbs is extremely productive in English. Usually the
same word-form can be used as a verb or a noun, with only the grammatical context enabling us to know
which category it belongs to. Thus, jump in the two sentences below is exactly the same in form but it
belongs to two different lexemes. In [4.15a] jump is the non-finite form of the verb ‘jump’ while in [4.15b]
it is the singular form of the noun jump.
[4.15]
a.
The pig will jump over the stile!
b.
What a jump!
In What a jump! the verb is converted into a noun by ‘zero derivation’, i.e. without using any affix. What
enables us to know whether the word is a noun or a verb is the position that it occupies in the sentence. If
we see the subject the pig and the auxiliary verb will before the word jump, we know it must be a verb. But
when jump occurs after the indefinite article a we know it must be a noun.
In [4.16] I have listed some common examples of forms that are subject to noun-to-verb or verb-to-noun
conversion. It is not difficult to think of situations where these words may be used either as nouns or as
verbs:
[4.16]
light
bridge
seat
kick
fish
bus
dog
lift
farm
police
smear
finger
smell
skin
rain
paper
[4.14]
a.
Inflection of compound stems
bed-room-s (*bed-s-room)
wind-surf-ing (*wind-ing-surf)
b.
Inflection of compound stems (including a derived base)
foot-ball-er-s (*foot-s-ball-er)
trouble-shoot-er-s (* trouble-s-shoot-er)
48 BUILDING WORDS

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Conversion is not restricted to nouns and verbs. Adjectives too can undergo conversion. For instance, the
word-form green realises an adjective in [4.17a] and a noun in [4.17b]:
[4.17]
a. The Green Party had political clout in the 1980s,
b. The Greens had political clout in the 1980s.
Likewise, some adverbs are formed from adjectives without any perceptible change in shape:
[4.18]
a. She is a fast runner, (fast 
Adj
.)
She runs very fast. (fast 
Adv
.)
Slow
has even more possibilities. It can be an adjective, an adverb, a verb or a noun:
[4.19]
a. He is a slow bowler, (slow 
Adj
.)
b. Go slow, (slow 
Adv
.)
c. Slow the car! (slow 
Verb
)
d. Mr Slow is a popular children’s book, (slow 
Noun
)
The widespread use of conversion shows the importance of the criterion of syntactic function in
determining word-class member-ship in English. Very often it is by its function rather than by its
morphological form that we tell the word-class to which a word belongs.