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In many cases, the verbs were distinct from their noun counterparts in Old English, and regular sound change has made them the same form: these can be reanalysed as conversion. A modern case of zero derivation in slang from popular culture might be seen in cringe, in the noun sense of "awkwardness, inducement of second-hand embarrassment".
It may involve the use of an affix (such as with employ → employee), or it may occur via conversion (such as with the derivation of the noun run from the verb to run). In contrast, a derivation resulting in a verb may be called verbalization (such as from the noun butter to the verb to butter ).
In linguistics, this is called conversion; when a noun becomes a verb, it is a denominal verb, when a verb becomes a noun, it is a deverbal noun. In English, many nouns have become verbs. For example, the noun "book" is now often used as a verb, as in the example "Let's book the flight".
Nouns are also created by converting verbs and adjectives, as with the words talk and reading (a boring talk, the assigned reading). Nouns are sometimes classified semantically (by their meanings) as proper and common nouns (Cyrus, China vs frog, milk) or as concrete and abstract nouns (book, laptop vs embarrassment, prejudice). [4]
Some verbs are formed from nouns and adjectives by conversion, as with the verbs snare, nose, dry, and calm. The base form is used in the following ways: It serves as the bare infinitive, and is used in the to-infinitive (e.g. to write); for uses see § Non-finite forms below.
The boundary between functional shift and conversion (the derivation of a new word from an existing word of identical form) is not well-defined, but it could be construed that conversion changes the lexical meaning and functional shift changes the syntactic meaning. Shakespeare uses functional shift, for example using a noun to serve as a verb ...
Words can sometimes acquire new lexical categories without any derivational change in form (for example, ship (in the nautical sense) was first a noun and later was used as a verb). That process is called conversion or zero-derivation. Like back-formation, it can produce a new noun or a new verb, but it involves no back-forming.
Thus, the stress difference between nouns and verbs in English is a general rule and applies not only to otherwise-identical noun-verb pairs. [2] The frequency of such pairs in English is a result of the productivity of conversion of parts of speech.