Pavol štekauer,A theory of conversion in English. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1996. Pp. 155.

When, in 1891, Henry Sweet (1891–98, I: 38–40) used the term CONVERSION for the process that today is also known as ZERO-DERIVATION, he was probably not aware of the debate that the description of this process would still raise one century later.

štekauer's book bears witness to a renewed interest in conversion. Such an interest partly stems from the fact that it is a simple (or, at least, apparently so), extremely productive process, but also because it remains a challenge to descriptive linguistics. How conversion operates, what its limits are, how converted units should be categorised in the study of morphology and lexis, and even what its real nature is are still open questions despite the attention given to this issue ever since Sweet's grammar.

This book meets some of these questions in the framework of an onomasiological theory, which will be briefly discussed below. The book consists of nine chapters, a section for notes and another for references. The introduction (chapter 1, pp. 11–13) justifies the work and outlines the structure of the book. The remaining eight chapters deal with the description of conversion in the literature (chapter 2, pp. 15–22), its interpretation as zero-derivation (chapter 3, pp. 23–43), the onomasiological theory and conversion (chapter 4, pp. 45–53), phonological variation (chapter 5, pp. 55–95), the use and semantic range of converted units (chapter 6, pp. 97–113), proper nouns and conversion (chapter 7, pp. 115–126), directionality (chapter 8, pp. 127–133), and the productivity of conversion (chapter 9, pp. 135–141).