25.2479, Review: Cognitive Science; Semantics: Martsa (2013)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-25-2479. Sun Jun 08 2014. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 25.2479, Review: Cognitive Science; Semantics: Martsa (2013)

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Date: Sun, 08 Jun 2014 11:24:03
From: Lixia Cheng [susan20050428 at sina.com]
Subject: Conversion in English

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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/24/24-3477.html

AUTHOR: Sándor  Martsa
TITLE: Conversion in English
SUBTITLE: A Cognitive Semantic Approach
PUBLISHER: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
YEAR: 2013

REVIEWER: Lixia Susan Cheng, Dalian University of Technology

SUMMARY

Conversion, also called zero derivation, is a kind of word formation. 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 creation of
the verb ‘humble’ from the adjective ‘humble’ or of the noun ‘attempt’ from
the verb ‘attempt’. The book under review explores English conversion within
the framework of cognitive semantics.

Apart from an introduction and conclusion, the book contains twelve chapters
which are evenly divided into four parts. Part I, ‘Previous Interpretations of
Conversion’, including the first three chapters, is a review of previous
studies of English conversion from different perspectives. There are generally
three types of interpretations: conversion as a morphological
(non)derivational process, conversion as a syntactic and lexical-semantic
process and conversion as  a category (under)specification phenomenon. The
first two regard conversion as a word-formation process while the third does
not.

The most common interpretation is zero derivation or null derivation, i.e.,
derivation by a zero-morpheme, meaning that instead of adding a derivational
suffix to change word class, one adds a phonetically zero morpheme to the
base. It can also be understood as “derivation without affixation”, that is, a
“zero operation” of derivation instead of “adding a zero affix” (p. 32).
Chapter One, ‘Morphological Interpretations’, examines these two approaches to
zero derivation and presents not only the advantages but also the danger of
this interpretation. It also gives a brief survey of the iconicity and
typological adequacy of conversion in the natural morphology framework.

Chapter Two provides an overview of another three interpretations: conversion
as inflectional derivation, a lexical rule and semantic extension, and an
onomasiological operation - recategorization of the naming units. The author
suggests that the nature of conversion should be interpreted by the last two
instead of the first one. The reason is that the syntactic/inflectional
interpretation confuses the effect of conversion with the cause since
paradigmatic shifting is one of the outcomes of conversion, not the
motivation, while the other two interpretations treat conversion as a semantic
derivation triggered by cognitive processes of conceptual mapping or
conceptual recategorization.

As for the non-processual interpretations, Chapter Three lays out three
models: Lieber’s relisting, Clark & Clark’s contextuals, and Farrell’s
category underspecification. All three have one thing in common - they do not
treat conversion as a process of word formation. Relisting is “a redundancy
rule in the permanent lexicon” (Lieber 1981: 181), that is, the already listed
items in the lexicon enter again as an item of a different word class. The
notion of contextuals highlights the situation where innovative denominal
verbs, for example, have some possible senses that can be fixed in certain
contexts (Clark & Clark 1979: 782). Category underspecification treats words
involved in, e.g., N>V conversion as having two potential meanings, either a
process (verb) meaning or a thing (noun) meaning, and which of the two is more
salient is dependent on the context (Farrell 2001: 113). According to the
author of the book, these non-processual interpretations offer a lexical or
contextual explanation but they, like the syntactic interpretation, also
mistake the consequence for the cause of conversion.

Part II, ‘Conversion in English and Other Languages’, circumscribes English
conversion and within the boundaries defined examines different types of
conversion. Chapter Four begins with a tentative definition - “conversion is a
kind of unmarked change of word class” (p. 61). But the author observes that
not all instances with this formal feature indicate conversion, for example,
homonymy, reference metonymy, deletion, grammaticalization and category
indeterminacy, all of which should be distinguished from true conversion. In
order to do that, the author clarifies the notion of word class and pins down
the elements determining the change of word class.

Chapter Five summarizes and compares ten kinds of classifications made by ten
scholars. They all treat N>V, A>V and V>N as the major types of conversion.
They do not agree with each other about some partial and minor types such as
A>N, transitive V>intransitive V, and countable N>uncountable N, which are not
considered as conversion by some of them.

In order to formulate a justifiable classification of English conversion,
Chapter Six discusses conversion in other languages such as Russian and
Hungarian. At the end of the chapter, the author offers a revised
classification of English conversion. Among the ten types of conversion, N>V,
A>V, CLOSED CLASS>V, V>N, PHRASE>N, PHRASE>A are identified as full
prototypical derivational conversion and the others such as CLOSED CLASS>N and
ADV>N are labeled as partial non-prototypical syntactic conversion in this new
classification.

The author argues that the ten types of conversion are all semantically
conditioned. And as mentioned above, the book is built up within a cognitive
semantics framework. So Part III, ‘Conversion as Semantic Derivation’, begins
with ‘Meaning and Conversion’ (Chapter Seven). Based on Kiparsky (1997) and
Lieber (2004), this chapter first examines the interaction between lexical
meaning and morphology in conversion, from which the author observes the
important role of meaning in word formation and also that of the speakers’
encyclopedic knowledge in processing meaning. The author then points out that
conversion is basically a semantic derivation in which metonymic mappings
(such as constituents of actions standing for the actions themselves) and
metaphoric mappings (such as animal verbs - e.g. ‘wolf’ in ‘to wolf down’ -
standing for the typical actions of the animals) motivate the semantic
extension of the base word. And it is the semantic extension or derivation
that underlies the conversion of this word. At the end of this chapter, the
author offers us his definition of conversion.

After setting up the analytic framework for a semantically based
interpretation of conversion and defining conversion as “a morphological
unmarked category-shifting word-formation process motivated by metonymic
and/or metaphoric mappings” (p. 131), the author goes on to examine the ten
types of conversion identified earlier in Chapter Six, and clarifies the
details of metonymic and metaphoric mappings in conversion verbs (Chapter
Eight) and in conversion nouns and adjectives (Chapter Nine). He concludes
that among conversion verbs the animal verbs are triggered by metaphoric
mappings and the other N>V, A>V and CLOSED CLASS>V are motivated by metonymic
mappings. All conversion nouns result from metonymic mappings.

If conversion pairs are semantically related in the sense that a new meaning
is developed from the meaning of the base word without change to its lexical
form, then this new meaning (the meaning of the converted word) is predictable
from the meaning of the base word. If the new meaning is predictable, then
conversion must have a predictable direction, i.e., between the conversion
pair one is the parent from which the other is formed. This implies that
conversion, like other word-formation processes, is productive. This is the
main idea of the three claims that Part IV, ‘Polysemy, Directionality,
Productivity’, aims to justify. Unlike the traditional opinion that the
relationship between the conversion pair is grammatical homonymy, the author’s
belief is that it is not homonymy but polysemy. This polysemy is not
prototypical in that it presents the related senses of two categorically
different but formally identical lexemes, while standard polysemy involves
related senses of one lexeme.

This intercategorial view of polysemy between conversion pairs is formed on a
close reexamination of the ten types of English conversion. It entails
inherent directionality of conversion, as the converted word is derived
morpho-semantically from the parent word. After analyzing the arguments for
and against directionality in Chapter Eleven, the author makes use of
Marchand’s semantic criteria (1964) and claims that the direction of
conversion is predictable in synchronic terms. This synchronic directionality
also entails regularity of conversion, which is discussed in Chapter Twelve,
where the author first examines the notion of morphological productivity and
then identifies twenty conversion rules. In view of the fact that conversion
is mostly rule-governed, despite a few types resulted from analogy, the author
confirms the productivity of conversion.

EVALUATION

The author says in the ‘Forward and Acknowledgment’ that the book is inspired
by Štekauer (1996) and Twardzisz (1997), and partly responds to Bauer &
Valera’s (2005) claim that some theories including cognitive linguistics have
not “tested themselves against the data of conversion yet”. His goal is
therefore to provide a cognitive semantic analysis of conversion in English
and to explore the questions that are left unanswered regarding this special
word-formation technique. Within the framework of metonymic and metaphoric
mappings, the author argues that conceptual reanalysis (based on encyclopedic
knowledge) and metonymic/metaphoric mappings motivate semantic derivation,
which leads to the obligatory change of word class. The author also makes an
in-depth study of three controversial issues concerning conversion: the
directionality issue, the polysemy vs. homonymy issue, and the productivity
vs. analogy issue. The first issue is found in quite a number of previous
studies but the other two have not been given due attention. So the author
analyzes different opinions on the issues first and then reexamines the ten
types of English conversion to identify the semantic link between the
conversion pairs. What he finds is that the semantic relationship between the
base word and the converted one is intercategorial polysemy. This settles the
long-standing directionality and productivity controversy because polysemy
suggests the direction, and directionality implies productivity. I think the
author has achieved his goals with the book, which proves to be another
profound contribution to the study of English conversion.

The only reservation I have is the classification of the types of English
conversion, specifically the first type of A>N conversion, for example, ‘poor’
A>‘(the) poor’ N. Such deadjectival nouns refer either to specific groups of
people characterized by the properties denoted by the input adjectives such as
‘poor’ and ‘clever’ or to things with specific properties also designated by
input adjectives such as ‘unbelievable’, ‘unexpected’, ‘unknown’ (p. 185).
Though it is labeled “partial non-prototypical syntactic conversion” (p. 102),
this special construction ‘the+A’ should be distinguished from conversion as a
process of word formation. The adjective is just syntactically in a position
(head of the noun phrase) characteristic of nouns but it is unable to behave
like a noun. For example, it cannot carry various grammatical markers in terms
of number and case as in *‘I saw a poor today’ or *‘Those poors really need
help’. Not only is there no inflectional evidence of the word’s status as a
noun, but there is inflectional evidence of its unchanged status as an
adjective like ‘the poorest’ in ‘to help the poorest first’. It seems that any
adjective can be used in such a structure. Thus I think it is not as strongly
rule-governed as most conversions are.

Although there are nouns in English that do not have plural forms (such as
‘police’, ‘luggage’), in this construction there is always the concomitant
definite article ‘the’ that under no circumstances can be replaced by other
determiners like number, as in *‘He saw two poors’ or a possessive pronoun in
*‘Our poor need help’. And this phenomenon can also be found in Mandarin
Chinese. Most adjectives in Chinese can be used as nouns, e.g. ‘hao’ ( ‘good’)
in ‘tiao ge hao de’ (‘choose a good one’) or in ‘ji zhe ni de hao’ (‘remember
your goodness/kindness’). There is a grammatical marker ‘de’ signaling the
functional shift of ‘hao’. When it is after ‘hao’, then ‘hao’ is an adjective
and when it is before ‘hao’, then ‘hao’ is a noun. It is concomitant with the
functional change of the other word just like ‘the’ in ‘the poor’. If
conversion normally involves changing a word’s syntactic category without any
concomitant change of form, then the functional shift of ‘poor’ and ‘hao’
cannot be called conversion. Such cases are best treated in syntactic terms
either as “adjective functioning as head of noun phrase” (Quirk et al. 1985:
1559) or “adjective functioning as a fused modifier-head” (Huddleston & Pullum
2002: 1642).

The book draws empirical data from major English dictionaries, Newsweek
magazine and the British National Corpus, which makes it possible to
thoroughly investigate the questions with numerous examples explicated.
Despite a couple of typographical errors such as ‘granstand’ (p. 33), ‘weekly
infecting’ (p. 36), this book is a valuable contribution to the empirical and
cognitive study of English conversion and a must-read for anyone interested in
morphology, lexicology and cognitive linguistics.

REFERENCES

Bauer, Laurie & Salvador Valera. 2005. Conversion or zero-derivation: An
introduction. In Laurie Bauer & Salvador Valera (eds.), Approaches to
conversion/zero-derivation, 7-17. Münster: Waxmann.

Clark, Eve V. & Herbert H. Clark. 1979. When nouns surface as verbs. Language
55, 767-811.

Farrell, Patrick. 2001. Functional shift as category underspecification.
English Language and Linguistics 5(1), 109-130.

Huddleston, Rodney & Geoffrey K. Pullum. 2002. The Cambridge grammar of the
English language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Kiparsky, Paul. 1997. Remarks on denominal verbs. In A. Alsina, J. Bresnan &
P. Sells (eds.), Argument structure, 473-499.
http://www.stanford.edu/~kiparsky/papers/hk.pdf.

Lieber, Rochelle. 1981. Morphological conversion within a restrictive theory
of the lexicon. In M. H. Moortgat, H. van der Hulst & T. Hoesktra (eds.), The
scope of lexical rules, 161-200. Dordrecht: Foris Publications.

Lieber, Rochelle. 2004. Morphology and lexical semantics. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.

Marchand, Hans. 1964. A set of criteria for the establishing of derivational
relationship between words unmarked by derivational morphemes. Indogermanische
forschungen 69, 10-19.

Quirk, Randolph, Sidney Greenbaum, Geoffrey Leech & Jan Svartvik. 1985. A
comprehensive grammar of the English language. London: Longman.

Štekauer, Pavol. 1996. A theory of conversion in English. Frankfurt am Main:
Peter Lang.

Twardzisz, Piotr. 1997. Zero derivation in English: A cognitive grammar
approach. Lublin: Maria Curie-Sklodowska University Press.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Lixia Cheng holds a PhD in Linguistics. She is an associate professor at
Dalian University of Technology and a postdoctoral fellow at Beijing Foreign
Studies University. Her research interests include grammaticalization,
historical linguistics and linguistic typology.








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