Adjective to Verb Zero Derivation in English and Macedonian: Reconsidering the Importance of Cognition in Understanding This Word Formation Process

Abstract

Zero derivation is a word formation process when the lexemes before and after the process, most often, when talking about clear or genuine types of zero-derivation, share the same form, display similar, expanded meaning, but belong to different lexical categories or subcategories - a characteristic conditioned by adding a zero affix to the first lexeme. Of the several types of zero derivation and the directions of this process that can be distinguished, for this paper the change from adjective to verb lexical category has been chosen to be analysed, by using the cognitive approach. The source, adjectival lexeme is zero derived in the target, verbal element and, when compared and contrasted, both lexemes are formally identical, in analytic languages, like English, but with inflectional modifications in synthetic languages, like Macedonian, displaying a lexical category change and semantic expansion. The aim of the paper is to show that cognition indeed helps in understanding this process in both English and Macedonian. The corpus consists of lexemes taken from reliable English and Macedonian dictionaries, while the elements undergo morphological and semantic analysis. The findings are applicable in any linguistic research which upgrades itself on the nature of the process in these languages.