Chapter 8. Paradigms in English and Czech noun/verb conversion

The study deals with English noun/verb conversion pairs that have both formally and semantically close counterpart pairs in Czech. The study’s aim is to examine how these nouns and verbs, linked with similar semantic relations in English and Czech, are accommodated in the two languages with different morphological structures and conversion playing a different role. The noun/verb pairs, extracted from the British National Corpus and from the SYN2000 corpus, are analysed as two-cell paradigms and examined along with selected derivatives. The data suggest that in the Czech sample, nominals are preferred over verbs in expressing the particular meanings and most verbs appear as denominal formations, often differently from their English counterparts.