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Paradigms in Word Formation: Theory and applications
Edited by Alba E. Ruz, Cristina Fernández-Alcaina and Cristina Lara-Clares
[Studies in Language Companion Series 225] 2022
► pp. 215–248

Chapter 9
Conversion in a paradigmatic framework of word formation

 | ESE – Instituto Politécnico de Bragança | CELGA-ILTEC – Universidade de Coimbra
This paper intends to present arguments that favour a paradigmatic approach to conversion, extending Bonami & Strnadová’s (2019) proposal of aligning relations within paradigmatic systems to the aligning relation criteria. The paper compares English and Portuguese conversion and syntactic nominalisations, according to the aligning relation criteria. Those criteria compare the different phenomena with affixed deverbal nouns situated in a paradigmatic level. A paradigmatic approach strengthens the concept of conversion as word formation because it enables us to observe an alignment between conversion pairs and affixation pairs, in contrast to syntactic nominalisations, which do not obey the same features of affixed deverbal nouns and are, thus, not aligned with them.
Keywords: conversion, nominalisation, paradigm, aligning relation
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.What is conversion?
    • 2.1Defining conversion
    • 2.2Does conversion exist in Romance languages as a word-formation mechanism?
    • 2.3Is directionality important in a paradigmatic approach?
  • 3.Conversion and syntactic nominalisations
    • 3.1Criteria
    • 3.2Application of criteria
  • 4.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • Abbreviations
  • References
Published online: 19 September 2022
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.225.09rod
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