Modern English vocabulary is exceedingly rich in conversion pairs.

As a way of
forming words conversion is extremely productive and new conversion pairs
make their appearance in fiction, newspaper articles and in the process of oral
communication in all spheres of human activity forcing their way into the existing
vocabulary and into the dictionaries as well.

New conversion pairs are created on the analogy of those already in the word-
stock on the semantic patterns described above as types of semantic relations.
Conversion is highly productive in the formation of verbs, especially from
compound nouns e.g. to motor — ‘travel by car’; to phone — ‘use the telephone’;
to wire — ’send a telegram’; to fire-bomb — ‘drop fire-bombs’.

Diachronic Approach of Conversion. Origin

ance of inflections in the course of the historical development of the English

language due to which two words of different parts of speech, e.g. a verb and a
noun, coincided in pronunciation. This is the case with such word-pairs, for
instance, as love n (OE. lufu) — love v (OE. lufian); work n (OE. wēōrc) — work v
(OE. wyrcan); answer n (OE. andswaru) — answer v (OE. andswarian) and many
others.

Synchronically in Modern English there is no difference at all between cases like

taxi n — taxi v and cases like love n — love v from the point of view of their
morphological structure and the word-building system of the language. In either
case the only difference between the present-day derivative correlations within
conversion pairs do not necessarily coincide with the etymological relationship.

In the word-pair awe n — awe v the noun is the source, of derivation both
diachronically and synchronically, but it is quite different with the pair mould v —
mould n: historically the verb is the derived member, whereas it is the other way
round from the angle of Modern English

A diachronic semantic analysis of a conversion pair reveals that in the course of

time the semantic structure of the base may acquire a new meaning or several
meanings under the influence of the meanings of the converted word. This
semantic process has been termed r ec onver s i o n in linguistic literature.

There is an essential difference between conversion and reconversion: being a

way of forming words conversion leads to a numerical enlargement of the English
vocabulary, whereas reconversion only brings about a new meaning correlated
with one of the meanings of the converted word. Research has shown that
reconversion

. Conversion is not an absolutely productive way of forming words because it is

restricted both semantically and morphologically. With reference to semantic
restrictions it is assumed that all verbs can be divided into two groups: a) verbs
denoting processes that can be represented as a succession of isolated actions
from which nouns are easily formed, e.g. fall v — fall n; run v — run n; jump v —
jump n, etc.; b) verbs like to sit, to lie, to stand denoting processes that cannot be
represented as a succession of isolated actions, thus defying conversion.