Fajardo, Mary Claire B.

BSED English 1-A

MORPHOLOGY AND WORD FORMATION PROCESSES

(Conversion and Acronym)

Conversion
Conversion is the process of changing the function of a word without providing any
change on its physical form, as for example, when a noun comes to be used as a verb without
any reduction. In other definition, it is a word-formation in which a word of one grammatical form
becomes a word of another grammatical form without any changes to spelling or pronunciation.
Other labels of this very common process are “category change” and “functional shift”. A
number of nouns such as paper, butter, bottle, vacation and so on, can via the process of
conversion come to be used as verbs as in the following examples:
My brother is papering my bedroom.
Did you buttered this toast?
We bottled the home brew last night.
In this sentences, the common nouns which are paper, butter and bottle transformed into
a verb that signifies the action of the subject without changing its original spelling and
pronunciation.
Words can be changed through the following functions:
1. Noun to a verb – for example, the word butter which functions as a noun can be
transformed into a verb which is to butter which when you used with regards of
cooking, it tells you to butter a certain food or delicacy.
2. Verb to a noun – in some instances, the verb to spy that means to secretly collecting
information become a noun which is a spy that defines as the person who work for a
certain individual to gather and investigate private information, mostly on high public
figures.
3. Verb to adjective – Another examples is action word see through that serves as a
phrasal verb of seeing beyond a certain thing or concept and was transformed into
another function, specifically, adjective which is a see-through material that means the
description of being seen through because of its transparency.
Acronym
Some new words known as acronyms are formed with the initial letters of a set of other
words.
Examples:
Compact Disk –CD
Video Cassette Recorder –VCR
National Aeronautics and Space Administration –NASA
The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization –UNESCO
Personal Identification Number –PIN
Women against rape –WAR