Introduction
No vocabulary of any living language is ever stable but is constantly changing, growing and decaying. The number of new words that appear in the language is so much greater than those that drop out or become obsolete, that the development of vocabularies may be described as a process of never-ending growth.
There are two ways of enriching the vocabulary:
1) Vocabulary extension − the appearance of new lexical units. New vocabulary units appear mainly as a result of: a) productive or patterned ways of word-formation; b) non-patterned ways of word-creation; c) borrowings from other languages.
2) Semantic extension − the appearance of new meanings of existing words which may result in homonyms.
But most linguists the leading role in replenishment of the English word-stock give to word-formation [D.Crystal, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English language].
Productive word-formation is the most effective means of enriching the vocabulary. The most widely used means are affixation (prefixation mainly for verbs and adjectives, suffixation for nouns and adjectives), conversion (giving the greatest number of new words in verbs and nouns) and composition (most productive in nouns and adjectives).
Of great importance and interest is one of the types of word-formation called conversion. Conversion, one of the principal ways of forming words in Modern English is highly productive in replenishing the English word-stock with new words. It is a characteristic feature of the English word-building system.
The main reason that conversion is so widely spread in present-day English is the word-forming process of conversion itself. Due to the limited number of morphological elements serving as classifying, marking signals of a certain part of speech, word-formation executed by changing the morphological paradigm is very economical and efficient. The majority of conversion pairs (more than 60 %) in Modern English are the result of conversion.
So the object of my investigation is the words, formed by means of conversion and the subject is the productivity and activity of conversion in present-day English. The principal method of investigation is the analysis of Immediate Constituents (IC), which helps to determine the ways in which lexical units are relevantly related to one another and thus revealing the hierarchical structure.
Пополнение словарного запаса английского языка на современном этапе путем конверсии (Conversion)
Contents
Introduction 3
1.Definition of conversion, its synonymous terms 4
2. Different approaches to conversion 6
3. The historical development of conversion. Diachronic approach 10
4. Conversion in present-day English. Synchronic approach 13
5. Criteria for primary/derived member in a conversion pair 17
6. Conversion of nouns and verbs 22
7. Substantivation and other cases of transposition 23
8. Stone-wall combinations (nominative binomials) 25
9. Sound-(stress-) interchange 26
10. Productivity.Traditional and occasional conversion 27
Conclusion 28
Bibliography
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