Word class and conversion

WORD CLASSES AND CONVERSION

Word classes are the same as what in
traditional terminology are called parts of speech and what many contemporary linguists call lexical categories.) In
English every word belongs to one of the part of speech (few could belong to
two like the word “love” which could be both noun and verb). Word classes, also
known as part of speech, are a categorization based on the function of the word
in the sentence. Therefore, if it is agreed that sentence is an essential
element of a language , the discussion on the elements used to build a sentence
must be essential too.

Word classes are a set of words that display the same formal
properties, especially their inflections and distribution. Similar to the more
traditional term part of speech.
The two major families of word classes are (1) lexical (or open) classes
(nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs) and (2) function (or closed) classes
(determiners, articles, prepositions, and others).

There are eight word classes,
or parts of speech, that are distinguished in English: nouns, articles, pronouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions,
and conjunctions. (Determiners, traditionally
classified along with adjectives, have not always been regarded as a separate
part of speech.) Interjections are another word class, but these are not described here
as they do not form part of the clause and sentence structure of the language.

English
language recognize seven major Word Classes. Observe the following chart of
word classes!

1. Verb: be, drive, grow, sing, think

2. Noun: brother,
car, David, house, London

3. Article: a, an,
my, some, the

4. Adjective: big,
foolish, happy, talented, tidy

5. Adverb: happily,
recently, soon, then, there

6. Preposition: at,
in, of, over, with

7. Conjunction: and,
because, but, if, or Determining the word class of a word:

In
English, there is no ‘one-to-one’ relationship between words and their classes:

1. The meaning of the
word (the kind of meanings that words convey è replacement test)

2. The form or
`shape’ of the word

3. The position or
`environment’ of the word in a sentence (where words typically occur in a
sentence, and the kinds of words which typically  replacement test) occur near to them.

B. The Classification of Word Classes

1.     
Open Word Classes

New
words can be added to the class as the need arises (new scientific discoveries
are made, new products are developed, and new ideas are explored): Noun, Verb,
Adjective, and Adverb.

2.     
Closed Word Classes

Made up of finite sets of words which are never expanded:
Prepositions, Determiners, and conjunctions.

Nouns

A noun (Latin nomen, “name”) is a part of speech which is used to represent a
person, place, or thing.[2] Based  on an Oxford
Advanced Learner’s Dictionary  “
Noun” is  a word that refers to
person,(such as Ann or Doctor ), a place( such as Paris or city), a thing( such
as table, can, broom), a quality or an activity ( such as plan, sorrow or
tennis)[3].

Many nouns can be
recognized by their endings. Typical noun endings
include:

-er/-or  :actor,
painter, plumber, writer
-ism     : criticism, egotism, magnetism,
vandalism
-ist       : artist, capitalist,
journalist, scientist
-ment   : arrangement, development,
establishment, government
-tion     : foundation, organization, recognition,
supposition

Most nouns have distinctive singular and plural forms. The plural of regular
nouns is formed by adding -s to the singular: Singular: car, dog, house Plural:
cars, dogs, houses.

            There
are two kind of nouns in numeral order, cardinal number like zero, one, two, 3,
fifty-six, 100, a thousand and ordinal number like first, second, third,
fourth, 500^th and so on.

PRONOUN

Major
subclass of nouns è sometimes replace a noun in a sentence. In English, there
are nine pronoun:

1. Personal Pronouns,
stand in for people, places, things and ideas subjective (I, you, we, they, he,
she, it) and objective pronouns (me, you, us, them, him, her, it)

2. Possessive
Pronouns: mine, yours, ours, theirs, hers, his, its.

3. Demonstrative
Pronouns, point out a specific persons, animals, places, things or ideas: this,
that, these, those.

4. Indefinite
Pronouns, replace nouns without specifying which noun they replace.
Singular: another, anybody, anyone, anything, each, either, everybody,
everyone, everything, little, much, neither, nobody, no one, nothing, one,
other, somebody, someone, something Plural: both, few, many, others, several
Singular or plural: all, any, more, most, none, some.

5. Intensive
Pronouns, also called emphatic end with self or selves and emphasize
(intensify) a noun or another pronoun.

6. Interrogative
Pronouns, used to begin or introduce interrogative sentences: who, whom, whose,
what, and which.

7. Reciprocal Pronouns
show a mutual relationship: each other and one another.

8. Reflexive
Pronouns, point back to the subject of the sentence; end with self or selves.

9. Relative Pronouns
begin a subordinate clause and connect it to another noun that precedes it:
who, whom, whose, whoever, whomever, which, whichever, that, what, whatever.

ARTICLE

When
do we say “the dog” and when do we say “a dog” (On this page we talk only about
singular, countable nouns). A/an are called articles. We divided them into
definite and indefinite. We use definite to mean not sure, certain. Definite is
particular. We use indefinite to mean not sure, not certain. Indefinite is
general.

VERB

            In simple terms, noun can be
understood as thing while verb is action. Take foe example, the sentence “He wants
freedom”. Freedom (noun) is something that he wants (verb). A verb is a part of
speech which is used to express an action or an existence verbs be (are, am, is
etc) are used to express an existence. Meanwhile, verbs other than be (write,
read, kick, etc) are used to express an action.

            It should be noted that the concept
of verb is very essential in the discussion of English sentence. An English
sentence should contain a verb, be it verb be or verb other than be. For
examples: she is a beautiful girl; she speaks English well.[4]

 ADJECTIVE

            An
adjective is a part of speech which used to qualify or modify a noun to give
more information about the noun. Typically describe an attribute of noun
endings:

• Can be identified
-able/-ible: achievable, capable, remarkable
-al: biographical, functional, internal, logical
-ful: beautiful, careful, grateful, harmful
-ic: cubic, manic, rustic, terrific
-ive: attractive, dismissive, inventive, persuasive
-less: breathless, careless, groundless, restless
-ous: courageous, dangerous, disastrous, fabulous
but we also have adjectives with no typical adjectival form, e.g.:
bad bright clever cold common

 ADVERB

            An
adverb is another part of speech which mainly used to modify a verb, an adjective,
or another adverb. To modify means to tell us more about a verb, adjectives or
another adverb. For example: Mary sings beautifully. David is extremely clever
Characteristics of adverb mainly always -ly ending: beautifully, carefully,
slightly, etc, -ly adverb it means that some are gradable: beautifully, very
beautifully
= DEGREE ADVE almost, barely, entirely, highly, quite, slightly, and
totally è un-gradable.

PREPOSITION
• Typically come before noun/noun phrase: across, after, at, before, by,
during, from, in, into, of, on, to, under, with, without

• COMPLEX
PREPOSITION: according to, along with, apart from, because of

CONJUNCTION

Conjunctions are used
to express a connection between words. The most familiar
conjunctions are and, but, and or Others: although,
because, before, since, till, unless, whereas, whether

C.     
CONVERSION

In linguistics,
conversion, also called zero derivation, is a kind of word formation;
specifically, it is the creation of a word (of a new word class) from an
existing word (of a different word class) without any change in form. For
example, the noun green in
golf (referring to a putting-green) is derived ultimately from the adjective
green.[5]

Conversions from adjectives to nouns
and vice versa are both very common and unnotable in English; much more
remarked upon is the creation of a verb by converting a noun or other word
(e.g., the adjective clean becomes the verb to clean).

‘Functional conversion’ is usually
used to describe the situation where a change in word class is not as a result
of affixation, and is only signaled by its overall grammatical context, as in:

I decided to toothbrush my way into
the bathroom.

Here ‘toothbrush’ is used not as a noun but as a verb,
and it suggests the image of someone trying to enter the bathroom while
brushing his or her teeth, probably at the expense of someone else who is
already in the bathroom or about to go into it.

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.

English is an ever-evolving language. According to Global Language Monitor¹, a new word is created every 98 minutes. Conversions are responsible for giving new meaning to existing words, and the conversion process in English is more commonplace in the twenty-first-century lexicon than ever before.