Indo-European

Abstract The chapter presents a survey of conversion in Slavic and Baltic languages. It summarizes how this word-formation process is approached in the literature, including specific terminology. Since in both Slavic and Baltic, conversion as word-class-changing operation is frequently accompanied by changes of inflectional markers and sometimes by morphophonological alternations of the base, the requirement of formal identity between input and output citation forms, which is a defining feature of canonical conversion in languages like English, is not satisfied. As new words can be formed by changing inflectional markers (inflectional classes) even within the same word class, word-class-maintaining word-formation without dedicated derivational material is also discussed. Both the word-class-changing and word-class-maintaining cases in Slavic and Baltic can be covered by the term conversion if it is understood as word-formation without dedicated derivational material.