Conversion in Albanian

Abstract

Abstract Conversion is a unique way of forming new words, when derived word has the same shape as the original word. In traditional grammars, quite dominant is the definition that during conversions there is a change in the belonging of the part of speech or at least the change of the syntactic category of the word, without any change in the shape. The morpho-syntactic approach is based solely on changing the part of speech, while the lexical approach relies on the creation of the new lexical unit. This paper is an effort to expanded approach and perspective, because conversion in Albanian occurs also within the same parts of speech, or without changing it. While in English and German conversion is one of the most productive ways of word formation, in French, Spanish and Slavic languages it hardly exists. Italian applies conversion in a slightly different way. Albanian, on the other hand, is extremely advanced in this respect, since we have identified more than 500 cases of undoubted conversion as well as hundreds of cases of polysemy with a tendency of dissolution with high chances of differentiation of meaning, making those words new lexical units.