Talk:Verbification

ARTICLE MERGE
I have merged the "verbing" article into "verbification," for they are the same thing, and I have deleted it from the duplicate page listing. --  Mac Davis  &#xE0D;&#x19B;. 11:44, 30 December 2005 (UTC)

Should this article be merged with anthimeria and turned into a redirect? I don't see a terribly good reason to have it off by itself when anthimeria is so stubby and this is just a special case of it. (Other than the fact that lots of people have heard of "verbing" and only a few "anthimeria", hence the redir needed.) Mindspillage (spill your mind?) 00:42, 5 Jan 2005 (UTC)

I think this should be moved/merged to Zero derivation since that's the official linguistic term; I never encountered 'verbing' in literature. (clem 21:47, 21 Apr 2005 (UTC))


 * I disagree since Zero derivation is specific to certain morphological theories. I think there should also be a descriptive, theory-neutral characterization of the phenomenon. But nevertheless there should be pointers from Zero derivation to this entry... -- Mumpitz 11:35, 20 January 2006 (UTC)

Verbing...
I asked my English Linguistics Professor today, and she said "verbing" is not what linguists would use as proper term. Maybe rename it to conversion (linguistics)? (clem 16:13, 13 May 2005 (UTC))


 * I've also never read the term 'verbing' in linguistic books or articles before, but I've mostly read stuff on Morphology and not so much on English morphology... *shrug* As to your suggestion to rename this article to Conversion (linguistics), I've started another discussion on this issue below. -- Mumpitz 12:36, 20 January 2006 (UTC)

Clem is right. This is not a helpful article. Far better to have one on Conversion or Zero Derivation. Verbification is not an accepted linguistics term, or a single process. Crystal's dictionary of linguistics doesn't include the term, and I'm sure the others cited by Mumpitz below don't either. If the Wikipedia policy bans new research, it presumably also bans the creation of new terms, not current in the relevant discipline.

If there is an article on verbification, then there could just as well be one on nounification, another on adjectivication, another on adverb-ification, another on preposition-ification, another on conjunction-ification, another on subordinator-ification, another on quantifier-ification, another on determiner-ification (or article-ification), another on noun-classifier-ification (for language which have that word class / syntactic category of the word formed), and so on, and so on ... Why bother?! The useful thing is to have entries on the different processes by which new words are coined, regardless of the class of the word produced. There are only a few of these processes. Nim C 05:29, 29 April 2006 (UTC)

I'm not an English native speaker, but shouldn't this page be merged or at least cross-linked with verbification? (me, 22:09, 6 Sep 2005 (UTC))


 * I agree - it's exactly the same topic. I've listed them on Duplicate articles -- 61.149.181.66 15:01, 13 December 2005 (UTC)

Conversion
There is a redirect from conversion to this article. I think this is not quite correct: 1) 'conversion' is more specific than 'verbification' (as described here). This article defines verbification as a process which transforms a word to a verb by any means. This includes, but is not restricted to, conversion which is usually defined as a morphological change of a word (usually changing its word-class) without any (overt) change of its form (I take this as the essence of the definitions provided in the morphology textbooks Haspelmath 2002, Booij 2005, Plag 2003, Matthews 1991, and Crystal's "Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics"; but maybe there are other uses of 'conversion' as well). Examples like mail / (to) mail could thus be regarded as cases of conversion but certainly not examples like enthusiasm / (to) enthuse (back-formation) or verb/(to) verbify (some instance of suffixation). 2) 'conversion' is more general than 'verbification' since it doesn't make any assumptions about the "source" and "target word-class". But it's not a superordinate of 'verbification' either because of 1). A correct superordinate might be 'transposition', but I'm not sure about that. -- Mumpitz 12:36, 20 January 2006 (UTC)

Mumpitz is correct in objecting to the redirect from Conversion. I have removed it. It gives non-alert readers the false impression that Verbification = Conversion. It was fundamentally wrong to redirect from Conversion to Verbification, because the process of Conversion can be used to produce words of any word class/syntactic category, not just verbs. For example, many nouns seem to be zero-derived from verbs eg. when we say "have a talk/look/bite/try/climb/go": these all feel as though they involve verbs turned into nouns. Similarly, "the rich", "the poor", and a golf "green" involve conversion of adjectives to a nouns. In the phrase "a student centre" a noun is being used as though it were an adjective. And so on. So Conversion definitely does not just mean "verbification". Nim C 06:27, 29 April 2006 (UTC)

Anthimeria or derivation?
Anthimeria and derivation are not the same thing; the former refers to the use of a word as though it belonged to a different word class, and the latter refers to the creation of a new word from an old one. Now, one could argue that there's no such thing as anthimeria, that to use a word as a different word class is actually to create a new word; but insofar as anthimeria exists, it's not a form of derivation.

It seems to me that verbing, at least as this article describes it, straddles the two; it refers both to the (anthimeric) use of non-verbs as verbs, and to the creation of verbs from non-verbs. So, "verbing weirds language" (where weirds is an example of anthimeria) and "she salted her potatoes" (where salted is an example of derivation) are both verbing.

(Similarly with verbification, except that I don't know the term for non-derivational verbification, as in "verbification weirdizes language". I don't think anthimeria applies in this case.)

Ruakh 03:45, 28 October 2006 (UTC)