DIACHRONIC AND SYNCHRONIC APPROACHES TO THE STUDY OF THE VOCABULARY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE
Keywords:
linguistics, semantic meaning, conversion, grammatical forms, syntactic functions, word formation, semantic relations, lexical.Abstract
The article investigates conversion as a means of forming new words without adding any derivative element when the basic form of the original and the basic derived words are homonymous having the same morphological structure, but belonging to different parts of speech. It is said that In the course of historical development grammatical forms in English were lost and there exists no inflexion to distinguish the form of the verb from a noun and this is considered as widespread word formation in English. Synchronically both types – a noun and a verb must be treated together as cases of patterned homonymy, while studying diachronically, it is essential to differentiate the cases of conversion and treat them separately. It is emphasized that it is not easy to say definitely which of the members was derived, the results of synchronic and diachronic analysis may not coincide. That means that what is understood under conversion in Modern English does not fully and necessarily coincide with earlier periods of the development of the language.
