CATEGORIAL CHANGE OF CONVERSION AND THE PROCESS OF RELISTING

Abstract

This paper will make an empirical inquiry into morphological conversion in English, especially the V-forming type, and will argue that the categorial change involved in this process can best be analyzed using the notion of relisting (Lieber (1992, 2004, 2005)). Relisting is a type of listing process in the lexicon, and it will be shown that it can deal with the directionality of conversion, its word-basedness, its various lexical properties, the variety of its input and output categories, the strong restriction against conversion from suffixed words, and the non-uniformity of the conversion output. We will also suggest that the relisting approach is appropriate not only for categorial but also for semantic aspects of conversion.