The research project ‘Conversion in English: The interaction of generic knowledge, contextual information, and syntactic constructions’ headed by Prof. Dr. Gert Webelhuth (research assistant: Dr. Heike Baeskow) will be supported for a further year, till April 2023.
The aim of this project is to develop a usage-based model for English conversion which efficiently describes this highly dynamic yet non-arbitrary process. The focus of the analyses is on (1) the linguistic and extra-linguistic factors which determine the non-overt shift from one (conceptual) category to another, (2) the way non-derived denominal verbs acquire their argument structures, (3) the interaction of context-free and context-dependent interpretations, and (4) the identification of communicative-pragmatic functions of conversion. The main database comprises 507 innovative converted verbs from the Oxford English Dictionary. Continue reading Research project supported by the Fritz-Thyssen-Stiftung extended by one year