Indo-European

Abstract Romance and Germanic languages exhibit similar patterns of conversion involving different input word classes. In this chapter, individual patterns will be briefly analysed also with respect to their diachronic development within the respective family. This is of great importance especially with respect to the status of structural elements such as the presence and status of thematic vowels which have undergone consistent developments and, consequently, caused substantial changes in the form of conversions. In both language families conversion appears to show a linear development with respect to the ancient languages. Overall, verb-based patterns prove to be much more relevant than the others. In Germanic, phonological reduction has largely simplified the conversion patterns observed in the ancient languages, while in Romance the variety already present in Latin has partially been re-elaborated, especially with respect to gender derivation and to the remorphologization of certain conversion types such as the semelfactive abstracts.