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Linguistics

Notes  
(20) [] x N →  [] x N V


The verbs in (19) therefore have the structure []   .
X

N V
A defining property of the notion ‘conversion’ is that it has a direction: in the examples above, the
verb has been derived from the noun. This phenomenon must therefore be distinguished from
multifunctionality, the situation in which words can be used for different syntactic categories without
a particular direction in the relation between these different uses of words. In Maori, for example, the
word waiata can be used as a verb “to sing”, as a noun “song”, and as a participle “singing” (Bauer
1993: 510). In Sranan, a creole language of Surinam, the word hebi functions as an adjective “heavy”,
a noun “weight”, an intransitive verb “to be heavy”, and a transitive verb “to make heavy” (Voorhoeve
1979: 43).
Change of category without overt morphological marking is also found in the case of middle verbs,
which are intransitive and denote a property, whereas the corresponding activity verb denotes an
activity (examples from Dutch):
(21) Deze aardappelen schillen gemakkelijk
These potatoes peel easily
“These potatoes are easy to peel”
Mars hapt zo heerlijk weg
Mars eats so nicely away
“Mars is so pleasant to eat”

(Mars is a kind of candy bar.) This kind of change from one subcategory of verbs to another subcategory
may be subsumed under conversion because there is a clear direction in the relation between the
verbs involved: the middle verb is derived from the activity verb.
In previous Unit you were introduced to the notion of paradigmatic word-formation, in which a
morphological constituent of a word is replaced with another one. A typical case of this kind of
word-formation is affix substitution, the replacement of one affix with another. In Dutch, female
counterparts of agent nouns can be formed by replacing -er with -ster (Booij 2002a: 6):
(22) aanvoerd-er “captain” aanvoerd-ster
betwet-er “lit. better knower, pedant” betweet-ster
rederijk-er “rhetorician” rederijk-ster
reizig-er “traveller” reizig-ster
oproerkraai-er “ring leader” oproerkraai-ster
The operation of substitution as a viable way of making new words has developed from systematic
relationships between words derived from the same base. In this case, both -er and -ster can be added
to Dutch verbs to form agent nouns. Thus a pattern [X-er] : [X-ster] could be observed, which was
N N
then extended to other nouns in -er without a straighforward verbal base. For instance, there is no
Dutch verb reizig “to travel”, and yet, the agent noun reiziger has a female counterpart in -ster. The
presence of the /d/ in aanvoerdster also betrays that this word is derived from aanvoerder. The /d/
does not belong to the verbal stem aanvoer “to lead”, but is part of the allomorph -der that is used after
stems ending in /r/. Since it is -er that is replaced, the /d/ shows up in the female agent noun as well.
A prototypical case of paradigmatic word-formation is back formation in which the direction of
derivation is inverted: the less complex word is derived from the more complex word by omitting
something. Well-known examples from English are to sculpt from sculptor, and to babysit from babysitter.
The noun sculptor is a borrowing from Latin. Because English has word pairs of the type V-[V+or] ,
N
{terminate-terminator, etc.), the verb sculpt could be reconstructed from the noun sculptor by
reinter-preting this word as having the structure [[sculpt] or] . The paradigmatic dimension involved
V
N
here is that a word ending in -or is assigned an internal morphological structure with a verbal base on
the basis of existing verb-noun pairs such as terminate-terminator.

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