Conversion and inflection

Abstract Sweet (1891‒8) defines conversion as the process by which a word changes its part of speech ‘without any modification or addition, except . . . the necessary change of inflection’. The chapter explores what these necessary changes are, starting from a view of inflectional paradigms as organized on three levels (content paradigm, form paradigm, realized paradigm), as proposed by Stump (2016). Changes from the input to the output of conversion processes are described with respect to the different levels of paradigms involved, and not just by considering the citation forms of the base and the output lexemes. The role of the inflectional classes to which base and output belong and of the set of stems of the base lexeme is also discussed. The final section addresses the distinction between stems and whole word forms as bases of conversion.