Chapter 7. Competition between affixation and conversion in Present-Day English denominal verbs

Abstract

This study investigates the competition between conversion and affixation in forming denominal verbs (to pixel / to pixelate , to glass / to glassify , to acronym / to acronymize ) in a dataset of 588 verbs first attested since 1950 and collected from the Oxford English Dictionary and the Corpus of Contemporary American English. The morphophonological analysis of the inputs reveals constraints preventing the formation of doublets, while the semantic analysis of the outputs shows how conversion and affixation are used for the expression of different semantic categories, thus limiting the number of semantic competitors. We argue that the tension between economy of expression and transparency of meaning is resolved by each verb-forming process specialising in distinct niches. Our analyses thus reveal some complementary distribution between conversion and affixation: each process tends to select different types of inputs and tends to convey different meanings.