Abstract

The topic of this paper are morphological and semantic properties of verb-to-noun conversions in German. I will argue that with respect to morphological processes two kinds of conversion can be distinguished, namely relisting and zero affixation. In relisting a stem which is already lexically listed re-enters the lexicon as an item of a different grammatical category. Relisting is highly restricted: it can only occur if the stem fulfills the semantic restrictions of the output category. Otherwise, zero affixation takes place. As is often the case with morphological derivation zero affixation is used to create words which are untypical members of the output category. My analysis is supported by distributional data: Syntactically, relisting conversions are similar to genuine nouns whereas zero affixations behave like ung-derivations.