Verbs can also be made from adjectives: to pale, to yellow, to cool, to grey, to rough (e. G. We decided to rough it in the tents as the weather was warm), etc.

Other parts of speech are not entirely unsusceptible to conversion as the following examples show: to down, to out (as in a newspaper heading Diplomatist Outed from Budapest), the ups and downs, the ins and outs, like, n. (as in the like of me and the like of you).

Substantivation

The cases when words with an ad­jective stem have the paradigm of a noun may be classified as substabtivation, e. g. a private, the private's uniform, a group of privates. Other examples of words that are completely substantivized (i.e. may have the plural form or be used in the Possessive case) are captive, conservative, criminal, female, fugitive, grown-up, intellectual, male, mild, native, neutral, radical, red, relative and many more.

The degree of substantiation may be different. Alongside with com­plete substantivation (the private, the private's, the privates), when the word possesses all the paradigms of the part of speech it becomes, there exists partial substantivation. In this last case a substantivized adjective or participle denotes a group or a class of people: the blind, the dead, the English, the poor, the rich, the ac­cused, the condemned, the living, the unemployed, the wounded, the lower-paid.

We call these words partially substantivized, because 1) they undergo no morphological changes, i.e. do not acquire a new paradigm and are only used with the definite article and a collective meaning. 2) they keep some properties of adjectives. They can, for instance, be modi­fied by adverbs. E. g.: Success is the necessary misfortune of human life, but it is only to the very unfortunate that it comes early (Trollope).

Besides the substantivized adjectives denoting human beings there is a considerable group of abstract nouns, as is well illustrated by such grammatical terms as: the Singular, the Plural, the Present, the Past, the Future, and also: the evil, the good, the impossible. For instance: "One should never struggle against the inevitable," he said (Christie).

Conversion in different parts of speech

Less frequent but also quite possible is conversion from form words to nouns. E. g. He liked to know the ins and outs, I shan't go into the whys and wherefores. He was familiar with ups and downs of life. Use is even made of affixes. Thus, ism is a separate word nowadays meaning 'a set of ideas or principles', e. g. Freudism, existentialism and all the other isms.

In all the above examples the change of paradigm is present and help­ful for classifying the newly coined words as cases of conversion. But it is not absolutely necessary, because conversion is not limited to such parts of speech, which possess a paradigm. That, for example, may be converted into an adverb in informal speech: I was that hungry I could have eaten a horse.

Some scientists extend the notion of conversion to re-classification of secondary word classes within one part of speech, a phe­nomenon also called transposition. Thus, mass nouns and ab­stract nouns are converted into countable nouns with the meanings 'a unit of N', 'a kind of N', 'an instance of N'. E. g. two coffees, different oils (esp. in technical literature), peaceful initiatives.

The next commonest change is changing of intransitive verbs in­to transitive: to run a horse in a race, to march the prisoners, to dive a plane. Other secondary verb-classes can be changed likewise. Non-grad­able adjectives become gradable with a certain change of meaning: He is more English than the English.