English conversion

[Martha McGinnis]

Dear Thai An,

Conversion, also known as zero-derivation, raises a couple of
interesting issues relating to DM.

First, zero-affixation.  DM takes the position that some Vocabulary
items are phonologically null (zero).  There's some discussion of
this issue in Halle & Marantz's 1993 paper in _The View from Building
20_, though with respect to inflection, rather than derivation.

Second, the nature of derivation.  DM postulates that there is no
generative lexicon: word-formation is a syntactic (and
post-syntactic) process.  You may be interested in Marantz's 1997
paper "No escape from syntax", in which he argues that lexical roots
don't have syntactic categories such as N, V, A; instead, nouns,
verbs, adjectives etc. are created by merging with functional heads
in the syntax.  There's been a lot of work following up on this
proposal (try Googling "category-neutral roots syntax") .

Good luck with your research.

-Martha


>Dear All,
>
>I'm doing a research on English word formation focusing on
>conversion. Any of you happen to know articles (on WWW) about it?
>
>Thanks.
>
>Thai An
>Vietnam National University - Ho Chi Minh City


--
mcginnis at ucalgary.ca