Chapter 9. Conversion in a paradigmatic framework of word formation

Abstract This paper intends to present arguments that favour a paradigmatic approach to conversion, extending Bonami & Strnadová’s (2019) proposal of aligning relations within paradigmatic systems to the aligning relation criteria . The paper compares English and Portuguese conversion and syntactic nominalisations, according to the aligning relation criteria . Those criteria compare the different phenomena with affixed deverbal nouns situated in a paradigmatic level. A paradigmatic approach strengthens the concept of conversion as word formation because it enables us to observe an alignment between conversion pairs and affixation pairs, in contrast to syntactic nominalisations, which do not obey the same features of affixed deverbal nouns and are, thus, not aligned with them.