14. The phenomenon of conversion.

Conversion is a highly productive way of coining new words in modern English. It is often referred to as an affixless way of building words. Or a process of making new words from some existing root by changing the category of a part of speech without changing the morphemic shape of the original root-word. Conversion is expanded by the analytical structure of modern English. e.g.: to buy – a buy. The question of conversion has, for a long time, been a controversial one in several aspects. The very essence of this process has been treated by a number of scholars (e. g. H. Sweet), not as a word-building act, but as a mere functional change. From this point of view the word hand in Hand me that book is not a verb, but a noun used in a verbal syntactical function, that is, hand (me) and hands (in She has small hands) are not two different words but one. But this case cannot be treated as word formation means due to the fact that no new word is built. Nowadays this theory finds increasingly fewer supporters, and conversion is universally accepted as one of the major ways of enriching English vocabulary with new words. One should guard against thinking that every case of noun and verb (verb and adjective, adjective and noun, etc.) with the same morphemic shape results from conversion. There are numerous pairs of words (e. g. love, n. — to love, v.; work, n. — to work, v.; drink, n. — to drink, v., etc.) which did not occur due to conversion but coincided as a result of certain historical processes (dropping of endings, simplification of stems) when before that they had different forms. On the other hand, it is quite true that the first cases of conversion imitated such pairs of words as love, n. — to love, v. for they were numerous in the vocabulary and were subconsciously accepted by native speakers as one of the typical language patterns. The two categories of parts of speech especially affected by conversion are nouns and verbs. Verbs made from nouns are the most numerous amongst the words produced by conversion: e. g. to hand, to back, to face, to eye etc. Nouns are frequently made from verbs: do, go, make etc. Verbs can also be made from adjectives: to pale, to yellow, to cool, to grey etc. A word made by conversion has a different meaning from that of the word from which it was made though the two meanings can be associated.

15. Compounding. Criteria of compounds. Types of compounds.

Compounding is joining together 2 or more stems. 1) Without a connecting element: e.g.: heartbreak, headache. 2) with the vowel/consonant like a linking element: e.g.: craftsman. 3) with the preposition/conjunction as a linking element: e.g.: down-and-out. There are at least three aspects of compounding that present special interest. The first is the structural aspect. Compounds are not homogeneous in structure. The criteria for distinguishing between a compound and a word-combination. This question has a direct bearing on the specific feature of the structure of most English compounds. In this case the graphic criterion of distinguishing between a word and a word-group seems to be sufficiently convincing, yet in many cases it cannot wholly be relied on. The word-group a tall boy conveys two concepts (1. a young male person; 2. big in size), whereas the word tallboy expresses one concept. Yet the semantic criterion alone cannot prove anything as phraseological units also convey a single concept. The phonetic criterion for compounds may be treated as that of a single stress. The criterion is convincingly applicable to many compound nouns, yet does not work with compound adjectives. Morphological and syntactic criteria can also be applied to compound words in order to distinguish them from word-groups. In the word-group a tall boy each of the constituents is independently open to grammatical changes peculiar to its own category as a part of speech: They were the tallest boys in their form. Between the constituent parts of the word-group other words can be inserted: a tall handsome boy. Any compound is not subject to such changes. In most cases only several criteria (semantic, morphological, syntactic, phonetic, graphic) can convincingly classify a lexical unit as either a compound word or a word group. Traditionally three types are distinguished: neutral, morphological and syntactic. In neutral compounds the process of compounding is realised without any linking elements: e.g.: blackbird, shop-window, sunflower, bedroom, tallboy etc. There are three subtypes of neutral compounds depending on the structure of the constituent stems. It was the subtype which may be described as simple neutral compounds: they consist of simple affixless stems. Compounds which have affixes in their structure are called derived or derivational compounds: e.g.: absent-mindedness, blue-eyed, golden-haired, broad-shouldered, lady-killer etc. The third subtype of neutral compounds is called contracted compounds. These words have a shortened (contracted) stem in their structure: TV-set (-program, -show, -canal, etc.), V-day (Victory day), G-man (Government man) etc. Morphological compounds are few in number. This type is non-productive. It is represented by words in which two compounding stems are combined by a linking vowel or consonant, e. g. Anglo-Saxon, handiwork etc. In syntactic compounds we once find a feature of specifically English word-structure. These words are formed from segments of speech, preserving in their structure numerous traces of syntagmatic relations typical of speech: articles, prepositions, adverbs, as in the nouns lily-of-the-valley, Jack-of-all-trades, good-for-nothing, mother-in-law etc.