- •English Lexicology
- •Preface
- •Organization and Content
- •Contents
- •Part I: Introduction
- •1.2 Methods and Procedures of Lexicological Analysis
- •Part II: The Structure of the English Lexicon
- •2.1 Words and Their Associative Fields
- •2.2 Word Families
- •2.3 Word Classes
- •2.4 Semantic, or Lexical, Fields
- •3.1 Synchronic Approach to the Structure of the English Vocabulary
- •3.1.1 Common, Literary, and Colloquial layers
- •3.1.2 Neologisms
- •3.2 Diachronic Approach: Etymological Survey of the English Word-Stock
- •3.2.1 Definition of Etymology
- •3.2.2 English Lexemes of Native Origin
- •3.2.3 Borrowed, or Loan, Lexemes
- •3.2.4 Classification of Borrowings according to the Degree of Assimilation
- •3.2.5 Etymological Doublets and Triplets
- •3.2.6 Folk Etymology
- •Part IV: The Word
- •4.1 Defining a Word
- •4.2 Morphological Structure of Words
- •4.2.1 Free and Bound Morphemes
- •4.2.2 Roots and Affixes
- •4.2.3 Stems
- •4.2.4 Types of affixes
- •4.2.5 Derivational and Functional Affixes
- •Inflection of Derived or Compound Words
- •4.2.6 Cliticization
- •4.2.7 Internal Change/Alternation
- •4.2.8 Suppletion
- •4.2.9 Reduplication
- •Part V: Word-Formation
- •5.1 Derivation/Affixation
- •5.1.1 Types of Derivational Affixes
- •5.2 Stress and Tone Placement
- •5.3 Compounding
- •5.3.1 Classification of Compounds
- •5.3.2 Endocentric and Exocentric Compounds
- •5.4 Reduplication
- •5.5 Conversion
- •5.6 Blend(ing)
- •5.7 Eponyms
- •5.8 Backformation
- •5.9 Clipping
- •5.10 Acronyms and Abbreviations
- •Part VI: Semantics
- •6.1 Types of Semantics
- •6.2 Word-Meaning
- •6.3 Types of Meaning
- •6.3.1 Grammatical Meaning
- •6.3.2 Lexical Meaning
- •6.3.3 Denotative Meaning
- •6.3.4 Connotative Meaning
- •6.3.5 Differential Meaning
- •6.3 6 Distributional Meaning
- •6.4 Phonetic, Morphological, and Semantic Motivation of Words
- •6.5 Semantics and Change of Meaning
- •7.1 Similarity of Sense
- •7.2 Oppositeness of Sense
- •7.3 Sense Categories: Hyponymy
- •7.4 Sense Categories: Meronymy
- •7.5 Related Senses
- •7.6 Unrelated Senses: Homonymy
- •7.7 Semantic Deviance
- •Part VIII: Word Groups and Phraseological Units
- •8.1 Basic Features of Word-groups
- •8.2 Phraseology
- •8.3 Definition of a Phraseological Unit
- •8.4 The Criteria of Phraseological Units
- •8.5 Classification of phraseologisms
- •8.6 The Origin of Phraseological Units
- •8.6.1 Native Phraseological Units
- •8.6.2 Borrowed Phraseological Units
- •8.7 Semantic Structure of Phraseological Units
- •8.8 Phraseological Meaning
- •8.9 Semantic Relations of Phraseological Units
- •8.9.1 Similarity of Sense
- •8.9.2 Oppositeness of Sense
- •9.1 Differences in Vocabulary between American and British English
- •9.2 Spelling Differences between American and British English
- •7.3 Grammatical Differences between American and British English
- •Part X: Lexicography
- •10.1 Main Types of Dictionaries
- •10.1.1 Non-linguistic Dictionaries: Encyclopaedias
- •10.1.2 Linguistic Dictionaries
- •Imitation
- •Glossary
5.4 Reduplication
Reduplication is a process of forming new words by repeating the entire free morpheme (total reduplication) or a part of it (partial reduplication). It is not a productive means of forming new words in the English language, but it is common in other languages like Turkish. A few examples of reduplication in English are win-win, lose-lose, blah-blah, bye-bye, and goody-goody. The following examples illustrate partial reduplication: okey-dokey, zig-zag, chick-flick, roly-poly, walkie-talkie, knick-knack, and others. These combinations are used informally.
5.5 Conversion
Although conversion, the term first used by Henry Sweet (1898, p. 38), is one of the most productive means of coining new words in Modern English, scholars still argue whether this phenomenon should be studied within syntax, morphology, word-formation, or even semantics. Georgious Tserdanelis and Wai Yi Peggy Wong take a syntactic approach to conversion. They believe that conversion is the creation of new words “by shifting the part of speech to another part without changing the form of the word” (2004, p.430), contending that in Modern English, there is no distinction between parts of speech, i.e. between a noun and a verb, noun and adjective, and others. Thomas Pyles and John Algeo (1993, p.281) use the term ‘functional shift’ to refer to the same process to highlight that words are converted from one grammatical function to another without any change in form, e.g., paper (n)--paper (v). This functional approach to conversion cannot be justified and should be rejected as inadequate because one and the same word cannot simultaneously belong to different classes of words, or parts of speech. We defend a position that conversion is a word-forming process and should be studied within word-formation because conversion deals with forming new lexical units and perfectly fits the definition of word-formation as the process of coining new words from the existing ones.
The major kinds of conversion are noun verb, verbnoun, adjective noun, and adjective verb. For example:
Noun verb: bottle (n)—bottle (v), network (n)—network (v), father (n)—father (v), mother (n)—mother (v), eye (n)—eye (v), head (n)—head (v), paper (n)—paper (v), taxi (n)—taxi (v), and trash (n)—trash (v).
Verbnoun: call (v)—call (n), command (v)—command (n), impact (v)—impact (n), commute (v)—commute (n), blackmail (v)—blackmail (n), e-mail (v)—e-mail (n), and fax (v)— fax (n).
Adjective verb: better (adj)—better (v), savage (adj)—savage (v), and total (adj)— total (v).
Adjective noun: crazy (adj)—crazy (n) and poor (adj)—the poor (n). Such conversions are relatively rare. Some scholars believe that they are not conversions at all but substantivized adjectives.
Adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions, interjections may act as bases for conversion, e.g. up (adv)—up (v) and down (adv)—down (v).
Although some scholars (Jackson & Ze Amvela, 2005) believe that conversion may occur within the same word class, e.g., walk (v) and walk (v) a dog, we do not consider them as conversions because they have different meanings of one and the same word, and these meanings are realized in the context. We do not recognize the class of marginal cases of conversion (Bauer, 1983), or partial cases of conversion. If any change is made in the structure, spelling, or pronunciation while new words are formed from the existing ones, we do not recognize them as conversions.