THE HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT OP CONVERSION

The problem of conversion may prove a pitfall because of possible confusion of the synchronic and diachronic approach. Although the importance of conversion has long been recognized, and the causes that foster it seem to have been extensively studied, the synchronic research of its effect in developing a special type of patterned homonymy in the English vocabulary system has been somewhat disregarded until the last decade.

This patterned homonymy, in which words belonging to different parts of speech differ in their lexico-grammatical meaning but possess an invariant component in their lexical meanings, so that the meaning of the derived component of the homonymous pair form a subset of the meaning of the prototype, will be further discussed in the chapter on homonymy.

The causes that made conversion so widely spread are to be approached diachronically.¹ Nouns and verbs have become identical in form firstly as a result of the loss of endings. More rarely it is the prefix that is dropped: mind < OE zemynd.

When endings have disappeared phonetical development resulted in the merging of sound forms for both elements of these pairs.

A similar homonymy resulted in the borrowing from French of numerous pairs of words of the same root but belonging in French to different parts of speech. These words lost their affixes and became phonetically identical in the process of assimilation.

Prof A.I. Smirnitsky is of the opinion that on a synchronic level there is no difference in correlation between such cases as listed above, i.e.

¹See: Jespersen O. English Grammar on Historical Principles. Pt. VI.

² The etymology of the word is curious from another point of view as well. Eschequier (OFr) means ‘to play chess'. It comes into Old French through Arabic from Persian shak ‘king'. In that game one must call "Check!" on putting one’s opponent’s king in danger. Hence the meaning of ‘holding someone in check’; check also means suddenly arrest motion of' and 'restrain’. Both the noun and the verb are palysemantic in Modern English.

words originally differentiated by affixes and later becoming homonymous after the loss of endings (sleep v : : sleep n) and those formed by conversion (pencil n : : pencil v). He argues that to separate these cases would mean substituting the description of the present state of things by the description of its sources.¹ He is quite right in pointing out the identity of both cases considered synchronically. His mistake lies in the wish to call both cases conversion, which is illogical if this scholar accepts the definition of conversion as a word-building process which implies the diachronic approach. So actually it is Prof. A.I. Smirnitsky’s own suggestion that leads to a confusion of synchronic and diachronic methods of analysis.

Conversion is a type of word-building — not a pattern of structural relationship. On the other hand, this latter is of paramount importance and interest. Synchronically both types sleep n : : sleep v and pencil n : : pencil v must be treated together as cases of patterned homonymy.² But it is essential to differentiate the cases of conversion and treat them separately when the study is diachronic.

Date: 2016-01-03; view: 2174