Bleg

Here's a question... When you use for example a noun as a verb (or vice versa) or a verb as an adjective etc... like Shakespeare does in many of his plays... what is the word for that? Does anyone know? I'm reading a book right now where the author does that all over the place.

Comments

[Duncan]

"zero derivation" or "verbification".

[danielle wilson]

Calvin of Calvin&Hobbes calls it "verbing". He says verbings weirds words.

[adam]

You don't mean a gerund, do you?

[Trochee]

Hey, I can actually answer this one. My two and a half degrees in linguistics are finally valid in the real world, to the degree that the internet is the real world.

Duncan above is right: "zero derivation" is the linguistics term. Also known as "conversion".

"verbing" (itself an example of the phenomenon) and "verbification" (note: itself a *non*-zero derivation, since '-ify' is a morpheme that converts nouns -and adjectives sometimes- into verbs) are more specific than "zero derivation", because they don't cover the "vice versa" cases.