A Study on Conversion Morphology-Syntax Boundary and Category Underspecification

Framed in the boundary between morphology and syntax, this paper is an attempt to prove how a 'believed-to-be' morphological process known as conversion is actually of syntactic essence. Conversion is widely understood as a morphological process that involves no visible affixation. The central position this project takes goes along with an underspecified categorical status approach in major word categories, which I intend to prove to be more likely to depend on the syntactic level than on the morphological one. For this reason the purpose of this paper is to study the possibilities of conversion to be regarded as a syntactic phenomenon rather than a morphological one and the impact that it causes in language.