Verbification
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Verbification, or verbing, is the creation of a verb from a noun, adjective, or other word. Verbification is a form of derivation, and may involve any of the various derivational processes. In English, verbification typically involves either the addition of an affix such as -ize/-ise, -ify, or en-, or the simple conversion (also called zero derivation) of a non-verb to a verb. The verbs to verbify and to verb are themselves products of verbification, and — as might be guessed — the term to verb is often used more specifically, to refer only to verbification that does not involve a change in form. However, neither term is in general technical use; in discussing word formation, linguists commonly use terms that describe the process of formation (such as coining or suffixation) rather than the lexical category of the new word.
Verbification may have a bad reputation with some English users because it is such a potent source of neologisms. Although most products of verbification are regarded as neologisms, and may meet considerable opposition from prescriptivist authorities, they are extremely common in colloquial speech, particularly specialized jargon, where words are needed to describe common actions or experiences.
Verbification is by no means confined to argot, and has furnished English with countless new expressions, e.g. "access", as in "access the file", which was previously a noun, as in "gain access to the file". Similar mainstream examples include "host", as in "host a party", and "chair", as in "chair the meeting". Other formations, such as "gift", are less widespread but nevertheless mainstream. Examples of verbification in the English language number in the thousands, including some of the most common words, such as mail and e-mail, strike, talk, salt, pepper, switch, bed, sleep, ship, train, stop, drink, cup, lure, mutter, dress, dizzy, divorce, fool, merge, and many more, to be found on virtually every page in the dictionary. Often it is impossible to tell which form arose first. Note all the examples in this paragraph involve the process of conversion / "zero derivation".
Some verbifications take the form of back-formations. For example, "enthusiasm" has been verbified into "enthuse". This kind of formation was used even by Shakespeare, who wrote in Hamlet of a star "[making] his course to illume that part of heaven".
Verbification is sometimes used to create nonce words or joking words. Sometimes these jocular constructions gain favor and become used in serious discourse, due to a subtle shade of meaning which is present in the neologism but absent from similar standard verbs, e.g. speechify. In other cases, simple conversion is involved, as with formations like beer, as in beer me ("give me a beer") and eye, as in eye it ("look at it"). Sometimes, a verbified form requires an adverb, e.g. sex as in sex it up ("make it sexier").
In other languages, such as Japanese and the Semitic languages, verbification is a more regular process. In Esperanto, any word can be transformed into a verb, either by altering its ending to -i, or by applying suffixes such as -igi and -iĝi.
[edit] Popular culture
A Calvin and Hobbes strip dealt with this phenomenon, concluding with the statement that "Verbing weirds language", demonstrating the verbing of both verb and weird. (The former appears in its use as a gerund.)
[edit] See also
[edit] External links
- "Grammar Puss" by Steven Pinker
- Figures of Speech
- "Verbing Nouns"
