This book received the Leocadio Martín Mingorance award This book describes three of the main
problems that the word-formation process known as conversion presents namely those related to
its definition its delimitation and its directionality. The latter constitutes however the
main focus of the study which is based on a corpus of over seven hundred lexical units and
more specifically on 231 actual noun-verb conversion pairs. Considering that directionality is
intrinsic to conversion the main question is whether it is always possible to establish the
direction of conversion or whether it is possible to do so only in some cases. Moreover the
study reveals what 'type' of directionality is involved that is whether the process is
unidirectional bidirectional or multi-directional. In order to answer these questions both
diachronic (etymology and dates of first records) and synchronic criteria (semantic dependence
restriction of usage semantic range semantic pattern phonetic shape morphologic type
stress and the principle of relative markedness) are analysed and assessed.
