Mei 12, 2016

Word Classes and Conversion

A.Word Classes 
There is a long tradition of classifying words, for the purpose of grammatical description, into the ten word classes (or parts of speech) noun, verb, adjective, adverb, pronoun, preposition, conjunction, numeral, article, interjection. While each of these terms is useful, and they are indispensable for practical purposes, their status in a fully explicit description of a language or in general grammatical theory remains disputed. Although most of the traditional word class distinctions can be made in most languages, the cross-linguistic applicability of these notions is often problematic. Here I focus primarily on the major word classes noun, verb, and adjective, and on ways of dealing with the cross-linguistic variability in their patterning.
1.The Classifcation of Words
Words can be classified by various criteria, such as phonological properties (e.g., monosyllabic vs. Polysyllabic words), social factors (e.g., general vs. technical vocabulary), and language history (e.g., loanwords vs. native words). All of these are classes of words, but as a technical term, word class refers to the ten traditional categories below (plus perhaps a few others), most of which go back to the Greek and Roman grammarians. In addition to the terms, a few examples are given of each word class.
Noun                                :           book, storm, arrival
Verb                                 :           push, sit, know
Adjective                         :           good, blue, Polish
Adverb                             :           quickly, very, fortunately
Pronoun                            :           you, this, nobody
Preposition/adposition     :           on, for, because of
Conjunction                     :           and, if, while   
Numeral                           :           one, twice, third
Article                              :           the, a
Interjection                       :           ouch, tsk
(In this article, the more general term `adposition' will be used rather than preposition, because many languages have postpositions rather than prepositions, and word order is irrelevant in this context).
The special status of the classification above derives from the fact that these are the most important classes of words for the purpose of grammatical description, equally relevant for morphology, syntax, and lexical semantics. This makes the classification more interesting, but also more complex and more problematic than other classifications of words. Besides the term word class, the older term part of speech (Latin pars orationis) is still often used, although it is now quite opaque (originally it referred to sentence constituents). The term word class was introduced in the first half of the twentieth century by structuralist linguistics. Another roughly equivalent term, common especially in Chomskyan linguistics is `syntactic category' (although technically this refers not only to lexical categories such as nouns and verbs, but also to phrasal categories such as noun phrases and verb phrases).
The main two problems with the maximal wordclass above are (a) that some of the classes intersect (e.g., the English word `there' is both a pronoun and an adverb), and (b) that the different classes do not have equal weight; while most languages have hundreds of verbs and thousands of nouns, there are far fewer pronouns and conjunctions, and often only a handful of adpositions and articles. The solution that is often adopted explicitly for the second problem is to make a further subdivision into major word classes (nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs) and minor word classes (all others). (Alternative terms for major and minor classes are content words / function words and, especially in Chomskyan linguistics, lexical categories / functional categories.) This distinction is discussed further in Sect. 2. The solution to the first problem that is implicit in much contemporary work is that pronouns and numerals are not regarded as word classes on a par with nouns, verbs, prepositions, and so on. Instead, they are regarded as semantically highly specific subclasses of the other classes, for instance, there are nominal pronouns (e.g., he, who), adjectival pronouns (e.g., this, which, such) and adverbial pronouns (e.g., here, thus). Similarly, there are adjectival numerals ( five, fifth), adverbial numerals (twice), and nominal numerals (a fifth, a five). Some languages also have verbal pronouns and verbal numerals. Accordingly, this article will not deal with pronouns (see Pronouns) and numerals (see Numeral Systems).
2.      Content Words and Function Words
Content word classes are generally open (i.e., they accept new members in principle) and large (comprising hundreds or thousands of words), and content words tend to have a specific, concrete meaning. They tend to be fairly long (often disyllabic or longer), and their text frequency is fairly low. By contrast, function word classes are generally closed and small, and function words tend to have abstract, general meaning (or no meaning at all, but only a grammatical function in specific constructions). They tend to be quite short (rarely longer than a syllable), and their text frequency is high.
3.      Kinds of word classes
In this section we will discuss the major word classes of English. These are nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs.
a.       Nouns
In many languages, nouns have affixes indicating number (singular, plural, dual, see Grammatical Number), case (e.g., nominative, accusative, ergative, dative), possessor person}number (`my,' `your,' `his,'etc’), and definiteness. Some examples follow.
Example   : book, pen, chair, table, etc.
b.      Verbs
verbs have affixes indicating tense (present, past, future), aspect (imperfective, perfective, progressive), mood (indicative, imperative, optative, subjunctive, etc.), polarity (affirmative, negative), valence- changing operations (passive causative, see Valency and Argument Structure in Syntax), and the person}number of subject and object(s) (see Grammatical Agreement). Semantic notions that are more rarely expressed morphologically are spatial orientation and instrument. Some examples follow:
Example   : read, talk, walk, write, etc.
c.       Adjective
In a fair number of languages, adjectives have affixes indicating comparison (comparative degree, superlative degree, equative degree), and in a few languages, adjectives are in¯ected for agreement with the noun they modify. Some examples follow.
Example   : beautiful, handsome, hard, angry, etc.
d.      Adverb
A word that modifies a verb, an adjective or another adverb, expressing manner, place, time or degree; a word that can modify a phrase, clause or sentence.
Example   : quickly, very, fortunately
B.   CONVERSION
Conversion is the word formation process in which a word of one grammatical form becomes a word of another grammatical form without any changes to spelling or pronunciation. For example, the noun email appeared in English before the verb: a decade ago I would have sent you an email (noun) whereas now I can either send you an email (noun) or simply email (verb) you. The original noun email experienced conversion, thus resulting in the new verb email. Conversion is also referred to as zero derivation or null derivation with the assumption that the formal change between words results in the addition of an invisible morpheme. However, many linguistics argue for a clear distinction between the word formation processes of derivation and conversion.

Zero Derivation (Conversion)
Corversion is a linguistic prosses that assigns an already existing word to a new syntactic (grammatical) category (part of speech) without any concomitant change in form (Lieber 2005: 418). It is the processes that may take part in the creation of new lexemes in English (Valera 2004: 20). This process is also known as a functional shift or zero derivation.
The most productive form of conversion in English is noun to verb conversion. The following list provides examples of verbs converted from nouns:
1.      Noun – Verb
·         access – to access
·         bottle – to bottle
·         closet – to closet
·         email – to email
For example:
·         My grandmother bottled (verb) the juice and canned (verb) the pickles.
·         My grandmother put the juice in a bottle (noun) and the pickles in a can (noun).
·         She microwaved (verb) her lunch.
·         She heated her lunch in the microwave (noun).
·         The doctor eyed (verb) my swollen eye (noun).
Noun to verb conversion is also referred to as verbification or verbing, as humorously discussed by Calvin and Hobbes.
Another productive form of conversion in English is verb to noun conversion. The following list provides examples of nouns converted from verbs:
2.      Verb – Noun
·         to alert – alert
·         to attack – attack
·         to call – call
·         to clone – clone
·         to command – command
For example:
·         The guard alerted (verb) the general to the attack (noun).
·         The enemy attacked (verb) before an alert (noun) could be sounded.
·         Sometimes one just needs a good cry (noun).
·         The baby cried (verb) all night.
·         We need to increase (verb) our productivity to see an increase (noun) in profits.
Verb to noun conversion is also referred to as nominalization.


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