SEMANTIC RELATIONSHIPS IN CONVERSION

The change in syntactic function and paradigm, i.e. in distribution, that the stem undergoes in conversion is obvious from the examples. As to the semantic changes, they are at first sight somewhat chaotic. Many authors have pointed out that dust v means ‘to remove dust from smth’ and also the opposite, i.e. ‘to powder’, ‘to cover with smth’ (e.g. to dust a cake with sugar); stone v means ‘to throw stones at’, ‘to put to death by throwing stones at’ and also ‘to remove the stones’ (from fruit).

A closer investigation will show, however, some signs of patterned relationships, especially if one observes semantically related groups. The lexical meaning of the verb points out the instrument, the agent, the place, the cause, the result and the time of action. The examples below serve only to illustrate this, the classification being far from exhaustive. It should be also borne in mind that the verbs are mostly polysemantic and have other meanings in addition to those indicated. Like other verbs creating a vivid image they often receive a permanent metaphorical meaning.

Verbs based on nouns denoting some part of the human body will show a regularity of instrumental meaning, even though the polysemantic ones among them will render other meanings as well, e.g. eye ‘to watch carefully’ (with eyes); finger ‘to touch with the fingers’; hand ‘to give or help with the hand’; elbow ‘to push or force one’s way with the elbows’; toe ‘to touch, reach or kick with the toes’. The verb head conforms to this pattern too as alongside its most frequent meaning ‘to be at the head of, and many others, it possesses the meaning ‘to strike with one’s head’ (as in football).

The same type of instrumental relations will be noted in stems denoting various tools, machines and weapons: to hammer, to knife, to machine-gun, to pivot, to pump, to rivet, to sandpaper, to saw, to spur,

to flash-light, to wheel, to free-wheel (said about a car going with the engine switched off), or more often ‘to travel on a bicycle without pedalling (usually downhill)’, etc.

Sometimes the noun names the agent of the action expressed in the verb, the action being characteristic of what is named by the noun: crowd ‘to come together in large numbers’; flock ‘to gather in flocks’; herd ‘to gather into a herd’; swarm ‘to occur or come in swarms’. The group of verbs based on the names of animals may be called metaphorical, as their meaning implies comparison. They are also agential, in so far as the verb denotes the behaviour considered characteristic of this or that animal (as an agent), e.g. ape ‘to imitate in a foolish way as an ape does’; dog ‘to follow close behind as a dog does’; monkey ‘to mimick, mock or play mischievous tricks like those of a monkey’; wolf (down) ‘to eat quickly and greedily like a wolf. A smaller subgroup might be classified under the heading of resultative relations with the formulas: ‘to hunt some animal’ and ‘to give birth to some animal’, e.g. to fox, to rabbit, to rat, to foal.

With nouns denoting places, buildings, containers and the like the meaning of the converted verb will be locative: bag ‘to put in a bag’; bottle ‘to store in bottles’; can ‘to put into cans’; corner ‘to set in a corner’; floor ‘to bring to the floor’; garage ‘to put (a car) in a garage’; pocket ‘to put into one’s pocket’.

Verbs with adjective stems, such as blind, calm, clean, empty, idle, lame, loose, tidy, total show fairly regular semantic relationships with the corresponding adjectives. Like verbs with adjective stems that had been formerly suffixed and lost their endings (e.g. to thin<OE thynnian) they denote change of state. If they are used intransitively, they mean ‘to become blind, calm, clean, empty, etc.’, their formula as transitive verbs is: ‘to make blind, calm, clean, etc.’.

Deverbal nouns formed by conversion follow the regular semantic correlations observed in nouns formed with verbal stems by means of derivation. They fall, among others, under the categories of process, result, place or agent. Thus, for instance, go, hiss, hunt, knock name the process, the act or a specific instance of what the verbal stem expresses. The result or the object of the verbal action is denoted in such nouns as burn, catch, cut, find, lift, offer, tear, e.g.: ... he stood up and said he must go. There were protests, offers of a lift back into town and invitations (McCrone).¹ Tory cuts were announced ("Morning Star").

The place where the action occurs is named by the nouns drive, forge, stand, walk, and some others.

H. Marchand² points out a very interesting detail, namely, that the deverbal personal nouns formed by means of conversion and denoting the doer are mostly derogatory. This statement may be illustrated by the following examples: bore, cheat, flirt, scold ‘a scolding woman’, tease ‘a person who teases’. E.g.: But as soon as he (Wagner) puts his

¹ The noun protests is not referred to as conversion, because its basic form is not homonymous to that of the verb due to the difference of stress: ‘protest n : : pro‘test v.

² Marchand H. The Categories and Types of Present-Day English Word-Formation, p.p. 293-308.

Wotans and Siegfrieds and Parcivals on the stage, so many heavy men, who stand in one place for an hour heavily wrestling with a narrative that nobody can understand, he is the very emperor of the bores (Priestley).

This is significant as it shows that the language has in store some patterned morphological ways to convey emotional meaning; these ways can form a parallel to the suffixes denoting deprecation, such as -ard, -ling, -ster.¹

The list of sense groups mentioned above is by no means exhaustive, there are many more that are difficult to systematize or are less numerous, such as, for instance, instrumental relations.

Nouns may be formed by conversion from any other part of speech as well, for instance from adverbs: ... the bounding vitality which had carried her through what had been a life of quite sharp ups and downs (McCrone).

Alongside these regular formations many occasional ones are coined every day as nonce-words. Sometimes, though not necessarily, they display emotional colouring, give a jocular ring to the utterance or sound as colloquialisms. E.g.: "Now then, Eeyore," he said. "Don’t bustle me," said Eeyore, getting up slowly. "Don’t now-then me." (Milne)

This rough approximation to a patterned system should not be overemphasized. As a matter of fact, words formed by conversion readily adapt themselves to various semantic development and readily acquire figurative meanings; on the other hand, there are many cases of repeated formations from the same polysemantic source, each new formation being based on a different meaning. Interesting examples of these were investigated by S.M. Kostenko.

The polysemantic noun bank was used as a basis for conversion several times. Bank ‘to contain as a bank’, ‘to enclose with a bank’ (1590) is derived from the meaning ‘the margin of a river, lake, etc.’; bank (earth or snow) ‘to pile up’ (1833) is derived from the meaning ‘a mound’; bank (a car) ‘to tilt in turning’, ‘to travel with one side higher’ is coined metonymically, because in motor car racing the cars performed the turn on the raised bank at the end of the racing ground. Later on the word was borrowed into aviation terminology where it is used about aircraft both transitively and intransitively with the same meaning ‘to tilt in turning’.

All the above listed meanings of bank n and bank v exist in the English vocabulary today, which brings us to a conclusion of great importance. It shows that a polysemantic verb (or noun) formed by conversion is not structured semantically as a separate unit and does not constitute a system of meanings, because its separate meanings are not conditioned by each other but by respective meanings of the prototype. If we take the semantic aspect as the level of contents, and the phonetic aspect of the word as the level of expression, we shall see one semantic structure corresponding to the phonetic complex [baenk] and not two semantic structures, one corresponding to the noun and the other to the verb, like the two morphological paradigms. ¹ For a more detailed treatment see Ch. 5.

It goes without saying that very much yet remains to be done in elucidating these complex relationships.¹

SUBSTANTIATION

The question now arises whether such cases when words with an adjective stem have the paradigm of a noun should also be classified as conversion, e.g. a private, the private’s uniform, a group of privates. Other examples of words that are completely substantivized (i.e. may have the plural form or be used in the Possessive case) are captive, conservative, criminal, female, fugitive, grown-up, intellectual, male, mild, native, neutral, radical, red, relative and many more.

Completely substantivized adjectives may be associated with determinatives, e.g.: Swinton combed out all the undesirables (Lindsay).

There is no universally accepted evaluation of this group. E. Kruisinga² speaks of conversion whenever a word receives a syntactic function which is not its basic one.

The prevailing standpoint among Leningrad linguists is different. L.P. Vinokurova, I.P. Ivanova and some other scholars maintain that substantivation in which adjectives have the paradigm and syntactic features of nouns differs from conversion, as in substantivation a new word arises not spontaneously but gradually, so that a word already existing in the language by and by acquires a new syntactic function and changes its meaning as a result of a gradual process of isolation. There are other scholars, however, who think this reasoning open to doubt: the coining of a new word is at first nothing but a fact of contextual usage, be it a case of recognized conversion or substantivation. The process of conversion is impossible outside a context. No isolated word can ever be formed by conversion.

L.P. Vinokurova distinguishes two main types of substantivation: (1) it may be the outcome of ellipsis in an attributive phrase, e.g. the elastic (cord), or (2) it may be due to an unusual syntactic functioning. e.g.: I am a contemplative, one of the impossibles.

It may be argued, however, that there must be a moment of the first omission of the determined word or the first instance when the adjective is used in speech in a new function.

There is one more point to be considered, namely a radical difference at the synchronic level: whereas words coined by conversion form regular pairs of homonyms with words from which they are derived, no such regular pattern of modelled homonymy is possible in substantivation of adjectives. It has already been emphasized that in nouns and verbs it is the morphologically simple words that form the bulk of material used in conversion. The predominance of derived adjectives prevents this class of words from entering modelled homonymy.

¹ Much interesting research has been done in the dissertation by S.M.Kostenko
(see p. 160); see also Quirk R. and Greenbaum S. A University Grammar of English.
London, 1973, p.p. 441-444.

² See: Kruisinga E. A Handbook of Present-Day English. Gröningen, 1932. Pt. II,
p.p. 99-161.

version. So it is one more manifestation of the systematic character of the vocabulary.

A noun of the same type may also be due to a more complicated process, i.e. composition, conversion and ellipsis, e.g. drive in : : a drive-in theatre : : a drive-in.

R.S. Rosenberg points out that semantically these nouns keep a certain connection with the prototype verbal phrase. They always reflect some verbal notion in their meaning and are clearly motivated. In case of polysemy their various meanings are often derived from different meanings of the verb-adverb combination and enter its semantic structure so that the resulting relationship is similar to what has been described for the word bank (see p. 160).

There is a kind of double process when first a noun is formed by conversion from a verbal stem, and next this noun is combined with such verbs as give, make, have, take and a few others to form a verbal phrase with a special aspect characteristic, e.g. have a wash/a chat/a swim/ a smoke/a look; give a laugh/a cry/a whistle; give the go by. A noun of this type can also denote intermittent motion: give a jerk/a jump/a stagger/a start; take a ride/a walk/the lead; make a move/a dive.

There is a great number of idiomatic prepositional phrases as well: be in the know, in the long run, of English make, get into a scrape. Sometimes the elements of these expressions have a fixed grammatical form, as for instance in the following, where the noun is always plural: It gives me the creeps (or the jumps), You can have it for keeps (for good).

In other cases the grammar forms are free to change.

Phrases or even sentences are sometimes turned into nouns and adjectives by a combination of conversion and composition. E.g.: Old man what-do-you-call-him’s book is on sale.

Chapter 9

SET EXPRESSIONS

Date: 2016-01-03; view: 3645