2) Substantivation of adjectives

Substantivation (or substantivization) is the process in which adjectives (or participles) acquire the paradigm and syntactic functions of nouns. One should distinguish two main types of substantivation – complete (or whole) and partial.

Completely (or wholly) substantivized adjectives have the full paradigm of a noun, i.e. the singular and the plural forms, the genitive case and they may be associated with various determiners (definite, indefinite and zero articles, demonstrative and possessive pronouns), e.g. an official, the official, officials, the officials, officials, officials’, this official, our officials.

Partially substantivized adjectives (PSA) do not acquire the full paradigm of a noun, i.e. they acquire only some of the characteristics of the nouns; they are used with the definite article. PSA fall into several structural-semantic groups:

a) PSA denoting a group or a class of people; used mostly in plural, e.g. reds, greens, blues, buffs, etc.

b) PSA denoting abstract notions, e.g. the good, the bad, the evil, the beautiful, the extravagant, the ordinary, the singular, the plural, etc. Such PSA are singular in meaning and form and take a singular verb, e.g. The good in him overweighs the bad. My mother never lost her taste for the extravagant. She didn’t regard Eliza's behaviour as particularly out of the ordinary.

c) PSA denoting inanimite things and used mostly in plural, e.g. sweets, ancients, eatables, greens, valuables, etc.

d) PSA denoting nationalities and used in plural, e.g. the English, the French, the Chinese, the Irish, the Dutch, etc. E.g. The English are great lovers of tea.

e) PSA denoting languages, e.g. English, German, Italian, French, Ukrainian, etc. Such f) PSA are singular in form and meaning, e.g. In number of speakers English nowadays is second only to Chinese. English is the official language of Australia and New Zealand.

3) Lexicalization of the pural of nouns

There are cases when the grammatical form of the plural of nouns becomes isolated from the paradigm and acquires a new lexical meaning. This leads to the appearance of new lexical units, e.g.:

a colour - colours (=hues) :: colours (=regimental flags);

a force forces (=powers) :: forces (=an army);

a custom - customs (=habits):: customs (=taxes on imported goods);

a draught- draughts (=currents of air) :: draughts (=a game);

a glass - glasses (=vessels for drinking):: glasses (=spectacles);

a manner - manners (=ways) :: manners (=behaviour);

a moral - morals (=lessons of a story) :: morals (=standards of behaviour);

a quarter- quarters (=forth parts) :: quarters (=lodgings);

a line - lines (a long, narrow mark):: lines (= poetry) etc.

4) Conversion

The problem of existing of conversion in Old English is a very contradictional one. In the Middle English period approximately before the XV-th century verb formation from nouns and adjectives was considerably reduced for the reason that a great deal of the French loan-nouns and loan-verbs appeared. But backformation, analogy and homonymy played a great role in the further development of conversion and soon (since the XVIII-th century) it became one of the characteristic features of English. Modern English vocabulary is exceedingly rich in conversional pairs. As the way of forming new words conversion is extremely productive and new conversion pairs make their appearance in fiction, newspaper articles, in the process of oral communication and in all spheres of human activity gradually forcing their way into the existing vocabulary and in the dictionaries as well. Conversion is non-affixal, morphological-syntactical way of word-building which leads to the morphological, lexical, semantic and syntactic changes of a derived word.

There are 5 patterns of conversion:

l. Noun > Verb (display, n > display, v; pin, n > pin, v; brake, n > brake, v);

2. Verb > Noun (slip, v > slip, n; call, v >call, n; walk, v > walk, n);

3. Noun >Adjective (lemon, n >lemon, adj; ice, n > ice, adj; nut, n > nut, adj);

4. Adjective >Verb (dull, adj > dull, v; narrow, adj >narrow, v; cool, adj > cool, v); 5. Adjective > Noun (tall, adj > tall, n; rich, adj > rich, n; dear, adj > dear, n).

Conversion is especially productive in the formation of verbs; it is, as a matter of fact, the principal way of forming verbs in Modern English. The XX-th century neologisms include a great many verbs formed by conversion, e. g. to can (=put into can); to microfilm (= produce a microfilm of); to motor (=travel by car); to phone (= use the telephone; to wire (=send a telegram), etc.

There are two types of conversion: complete (a word is included in a new paradigm and is characterized by new grammatical categories, accepts another syntactic function and a new lexical-grammatical meaning) and partial (at first a noun is formed by conversion from a verbal stem, and then this noun is combined with such verbs as: give, make, have, take and a few others to form a verbal phrase: to have a smoke; to take a walk; to give a ride)

The classification of lexical units according to the semantic relation in conversional pairs includes the following semantic relations, for example in the pattern N > V: 1. to do with N: to knife; to brake; to brush; 2. to put in / on N: to bottle, to bag, to can; 3. to be (act as) N: to captain, to witness, to nurse; 4. to make, change into N: to arch, to parcel, to knight.

The structural classification includes the following types of stems:

1. Simple (non-derivating) stems consisting of only one root morpheme which is indivisible (a key, a mask, a glass, a mop, a wall);

1. Affixal (derivative) stems consisting of a root morpheme and one or more affixal morphemes (a telegraph, a volunteer);

2. Compound stems consisting of two or more simple stems (side-track, v; lushcarpet, v);

3. Abbreviation stems (V-8, UN).

Nevertheless there are factors which limit the productivity of conversion. They are:

1) The lexical meaning of the stem. In English there are verbs like sit from which converted nouns can’t be formed because an action denoted by the verb can’t be regarded as a number of single actions;

2) The structural peculiarities of the word. They can be explained by etymology and the main point is that units converted from compounds and acronyms are very rare.

3) The social need for a converted unit, i. e. the creation of a new word due to the language needs of social groups. The presence in language of noun-and-verb pairs in the language created by other ways of word-formation also limits conversion because such creation of parallel words isn’t aroused by the necessity and is not justified by a society. It is very important to take into account that not all the converted words are accepted by the language. There are the words which are created not for the needs of the society but for gaining new or oriental effect. E. g.: to rubbish somebody – „to assert persistently that whatever somebody says or writes is rubbish”; to host a luncheon – „to act as host at luncheon party”.

The analysis of conversional pairs in different historical periods has shown that conversion as one of the types of word-building was productive at every stage of development of the English language and it is still productive nowadays.