Describing Derivational operations

Please imagine all > in this post are → (right arrow) instead. I thought
the substitution obvious enough, but you never can tell. That said, on
with the post proper...

Thanks to some of the recent discussion on the list, I'm finally starting
to make serious headway into the derivational mechanisms of Br'ga.
Thusfar, I have classes of suffixes that change the part of speech of a
stem, collated by the source and target parts of speech, e.g. v > n for
verb to noun operations (verb > agent, or verb > patient, ia).

I also have a small collection of operations that apply equally well to
either nouns or verbs (everything that isn't a noun is a verb in Br'ga),
such as the augmentative suffix. Bearing in mind this universal
applicability and lack of type change, I've been denoting them as the "α >
α" collection (that is, {alpha} > {alpha}), based on some
vaguely-remembered computer-programming theory book from years ago.

Is there a better short term for this, or am I safe enough using α > α, as
long as I define it longhand before I get into discussing it? Does it have
some horrific but all-too-common meaning elsewhere in linguistics, or
anything like that?




Paul