An important part of learning any foreign language is word formation. You need to understand its mechanisms and work out ways to constantly expand your vocabulary and speak a living, modern language. Conversion in English is one of the most common word formation methods, so you should try to master it perfectly.
What is conversion?
Conversion in English is a word-formation method in which a word passes from one part of speech to another without a visible change in its external form. The word obtained as a result of conversion begins to refer to another part of speech, acquires new syntactic and morphological features.
English is an analytical language. You can understand what part of speech the word belongs to by its place in the sentence, since the words always stand in a certain order, which is strictly forbidden to violate. Suffixes and other morphological inflections are practically absent, due to which it is possible to determine belonging to one or another part of speech. Changes to words occur in it primarily through changes in their syntactic features. Conversion in English does not occur by changing the end of a word or its prefix, as, for example, in Russian, but by changing its grammatical features. That is why this type of word formation is so popular, simple and widespread among the English-speaking population.
Conversion exists in other languages. For example, in the Russian language you can find examples of this method of word formation, this is especially pronounced when words are transferred from adjectives to nouns. For example, day off, sick, bath. However, due to the factors listed above, it was in the English language that conversion became the most productive and widespread type of formation of new words. Non-analytical languages often use inflectional means and changes in the external form of a word to enrich vocabulary.
Here is the easiest conversion example in English. Many English nouns easily become verbs.
Hate - to hate - hate - hate;
Water - to water - water.
Types of word formation
Linguists have identified several of the most common and productive ways of word formation in the English language. Conversion is one of the most popular.
Affixation (adding an affix particle to the base of a word), compounding (adding one stem of a word to another), reversion (removing from an affix word, only the stem remains), collocation (combining fragments of two or more words) and abbreviation are also distinguished.
In addition, there are secondary and less common ways of word formation. This alternation, doubling, onomatopoeia and rhyming repeat. They are rarely used and need more detailed consideration only with in-depth study of the English language from the point of view of professional linguistics.
History of occurrence
Conversion gained popularity around the thirteenth century AD, when the phonetic rules of the English language changed and many suffixes and affixes disappeared. By the way, many nouns and verbs that seem similar in external form were not formed as a result of conversion, just during the reform in the English language their form accidentally coincided, for example, work and to work, smell and to smell.
It is believed that, like many other phenomena, conversion in the English language was popularized by William Shakespeare. In his works, he often used many established nouns in the form of a verb, some of them took root and became part of colloquial speech.
It is to Shakespeare that linguists attribute the use of the nouns humor, elbow, champion, lapse and blanket in the form of a verb. At the same time, many words from the work of Shakespeare formed through conversion did not take root in the language.
Verbalization
There are three of the most popular conversion areas in modern English. One of them is verbalization, the transition of nouns into the category of verbs. Often, a new word means activity similar in meaning to the originally existing word.
Often these are verbs meaning the extraction of something, the production or use of an object. This trend is familiar to all people studying English, even if they don’t know what it's called and have never heard of conversion in English. Examples of words:
- fish - to fish - fish - to fish;
- email - to email - email - send email.
Sometimes adverbs can also participate in verbalization if they do not have suffixes. Here are some examples of this transition:
- clean - to clean - clean - to clean;
- calm - to calm - calm.
Substantiation
Substantiation is the type of conversion in English, in which a word from any part of the speech becomes a noun. Often in this direction follow verbs meaning action. Such nouns often mean perfect action. Example:
- to read - a read - read - read, read.
Verbs can also become nouns as a result of conversion, which mean the end result of an action. An example of such a transition:
- to find - a find - search - find.
Sometimes in English, the conversion occurs according to a very unusual scenario. Even a seemingly insignificant part of speech, such as an excuse, can become a noun. Here is an example of such an unusual transition:
- up, down - ups and downs - up, down - ups and downs.
Adjective
Adjunctivation is the rarest and least productive type of conversion. This is the name of the word transition from any part of speech to the adjective. Often this is a conversion in the direction "geographical name - an adjective, meaning belonging to a place, nationality." Such a direction of conversion can be found in English quite rarely, it is often used in idioms and other well-established expressions.
Classic and non-classic conversion
Some native speakers and people living in English-speaking countries, in modern English spoken language, conditionally distinguish two types of conversion, classical and non-classical.
In the first form of conversion, a word, moving from one part of speech to another, does not essentially change its lexical meaning, and translating it into Russian will not be difficult. Here is an example sentence in English with a conversion of this kind:
- Please, water that flower - Please fill that flower.
With the non-classical form of conversion, small changes occur. Sometimes the stress in the word changes after the transition, sometimes it begins to be pronounced differently phonetically. The simplest and most common form of such a change is the replacement of one letter in a word after conversion. The most common example:
- to advice - advise - advise - advice.
Conversion Importance
When learning English, you need to pay close attention to conversion. This will help to significantly expand your vocabulary, because when learning a new word, the student will automatically study a similarly meaning verb or other parts of speech that have the same external form, but can act as another part of speech.
Also, conversion in English is an important tool for translating text. It is important to understand what part of speech is in front of you in order to translate the sentence as adequately as possible.
In addition, when speaking, you can easily form the verb you need with the help of conversion, without resorting to long and cumbersome constructions, searching for synonyms and without recalling the word you have learned and forgotten earlier. You can create new vocabulary yourself, and a native speaker will most likely understand what you mean.
In the modern world, new technologies, media personalities, events appear every day, and at the same time, many neologisms are born in all languages of the world. The lexical composition of the English language is constantly enriched with words formed with the help of conversion. Therefore, you need to master this method of word formation in the first place, and then take the time for the rest. This will allow you to speak like a real native speaker and easily understand the oral and written text.