Canonical and non-canonical conversion in Baltic

Conversion is best known from languages like English where nouns may be used as verbs and vice versa without any formal marking, e.g., email (n) – email (v), walk (v) – walk (n). Such pairs can be interpreted either as instances of derivation without overt affixation or as cases of lexical multifunctionality. I pose the question of whether the concept of conversion can be successfully applied to inflectionally rich languages like Latvian and Lithuanian (Baltic, Indo-European), and argue for recognizing a continuum of phenomena based on the canonical typology approach developed by Greville G. Corbett and colleagues. I begin with canonical cases of conversion where the change of word class has no formal expression, and move on to less canonical examples characterized by inflectional class change, vowel, consonant, and tone alternations.

Jurgis Pakerys is a professor of Baltic linguistics at the Department of Baltic Studies, Vilnius University. His recent research includes studies on derivational networks, verbal inflection classes, and onomatopoeia, as well as on transitivity pairs and morphological and periphrastic causative constructions in the Baltic languages. Currently, he focuses on interpreting conversion in Baltic and evaluating derivational productivity in Lithuanian.