The historical development of conversion Conversion in present-day

The historical development of conversion. Conversion in present-day English Grechkina Yana Group 304

Conversion. What does it mean? ! The process of coining a new word in a different part of speech and with a different distribution characteristic but without adding any derivative element, so that the basic form of the original and the basic form of the derived words are homonymous, is variously called conversion.

The aim: to track the development of the various stages of conversion. The problem: to explore and to learn the scientific literature on this topic.

The criterion to establish the original and derived item has been taken from Marchand. It focuses on several aspects: the semantic dependence (the word that reports to the meaning of the other is the derivative) the range of usage (the item with the smaller range of use is the converted word), the semantic range (the one with less semantic fields is the shifted item) and the phonetic shape (some suffixes express the wordclass the item belongs to and, if it does not fit, this is the derivative).

The examples of conversion: 1)carian v care v-n cam n 2)drincan v drink v- n drinca, drinc n 3) slsepan v sleep v step, slep n

The examples of conversion: 4) eschequier v check v, n eschec n 5) crier v cry v, n cri n

The examples of conversion: n water burn love hope sleep v to water to burn to love to hope to sleep

Conversion in present-day English Recent research suggests that this regular or patterned or modelled homonymy has some characteristic features: statistical data obtained at Leningrad University show, for example, that it regularly involves monosyllabic words of a simple morphological structure.

Conclusion Most new words are not as new as we tend to think. They are just readjustments within the same language, like additions to existing items or recombination of elements.

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