Category Change without Overt Marking

Abstract

AbstractCategory change without overt marking is often called conversion or zero‐derivation. In discussing a few landmarks in the research on conversion, this article presents the arguments for and against the idea that conversion is a separate grammatical process, or that it is performed through zero affixes. The empirical evidence supports the idea that, within certain limits, conversion does not exist as a separate process or means to derive words, but rather that it is an epiphenomenon resulting from uncategorized elements in the lexicon that can be freely inserted into syntactic environments that define the category of the inserted element.