Re: Linguistic term for ease of changing word-class (was: 'out-' affix in conlangs?)

Eldin Raigmore wrote:
>
>BTW I once read a scholarly book by a true professional linguist on the
>ease of
>forming new words of one class from words of another class.  I forget the
>title
>of the book and the name of the book's author (though I still have it --
>somewhere -- ...)
Even after almost 20 years in this house, I still have boxes of books in
storage. Aargh.
>
>However, I remember it said (among other things) that in most languages...
I'd question that "most"!!

>...(though I recall only the English examples) it was particularly easy to
>make a
>verb from another word-class, especially from a noun.  (example: "to pipe
>someone aboard". "Pipe" was a noun; it can however be used as a verb,
>whether transitive or intransitive, with no morphology having been done on
>it
>at all -- a kind of "zero-derivation".)
This seems to be a peculiar ability of English, and I think it can be a
pretty random process. There are of course cases like (vb.) projéct, (n.)
próject, and genuine cases of zero-derivation like love (n or vb.).  Your
pipe example, of course, refers to the little whistle-thingy used in the
Navy (I think Brits can use it for bagpiping too) so is a highly specific
case.

But yes, English can do this easily. Note also "welcome" as interjection,
noun, verb or adjective.

William Safire, in his NYT column, likes to point out horrors like
"surveillance : to surveille" or "liaison : to liase", not quite in the same
category but close. Also, purists dislike "fínance" replacing the old
distinction finánce : fínance (not sure which is the verb/noun, though it
was drilled into me once upon a time :-(( ).

Indonesian can have zero-derivation in colloquial speech-- surat can mean
'to write' or 'a letter', cinta 'love' can be noun or verb; but correctly,
when used as verbs there ought to be a verbal prefix...  I really suspect
not many languages can do this as readily as English does. (German/Dutch and
Romance lgs. come to mind).

Sort of OT, but relevant to the question about Basque verbs-- IIRC the verbs
that have their own synthetic conjugation (i.e. without the usual
person+tense aux.) are a small and closed class, I think mostly
intransitive. There's another productive (I think) class formed from NOUN +
'to do/make' (egin?); one that has stuck in my mind is 'to sneeze' (sneeze +
egin? + aux). (My Basque grammar is one of the books in storage.......)

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