Keynote: The relevance of syntax for conversion: Insights from nominalizations
Gianina Iordăchioaia
In this talk I offer an overview of the variety of phenomena that can be subsumed by conversion and I introduce diagnostic criteria to distinguish between theoretically-motivated subtypes and corresponding analytical means to model them. By taking a syntactic approach to these formations and focusing on deverbal and deadjectival conversion nouns and nominalizations, I will argue for three types of conversions, determined by the complexity of their internal structure: root-based conversions, which deserve an underspecified (or 'multifunctional') analysis; morphological conversions, which resemble suffixed nominalizations; and syntactic conversions, which show no internal nominal properties, just the external distributions of nouns. The broader point I aim to make is that a purely word-based morphological approach to conversion will miss important distinctions between morphological and syntactic conversion, which can only be detected if the sntactic behaviour of these formations is also closely examined.