Adjective to Verb Zero Derivation in English and Macedonian: Reconsidering the Importance of Cognition in Understanding This Word Formation Process Marjana Vaneva School of Foreign Languages, University American College Skopje, Skopje, R. Macedonia Abstract—Zero derivation is a word formation process when the lexemes before and after the process, most often, when talking about clear or genuine types of zero-derivation, share the same form, display similar, expanded meaning, but belong to different lexical categories or subcategories - a characteristic conditioned by adding a zero affix to the first lexeme. Of the several types of zero derivation and the directions of this process that can be distinguished, for this paper the change from adjective to verb lexical category has been chosen to be analysed, by using the cognitive approach. The source, adjectival lexeme is zero derived in the target, verbal element and, when compared and contrasted, both lexemes are formally identical, in analytic languages, like English, but with inflectional modifications in synthetic languages, like Macedonian, displaying a lexical category change and semantic expansion. The aim of the paper is to show that cognition indeed helps in understanding this process in both English and Macedonian. The corpus consists of lexemes taken from reliable English and Macedonian dictionaries, while the elements undergo morphological and semantic analysis. The findings are applicable in any linguistic research which upgrades itself on the nature of the process in these languages. Index Terms—zero derivation, cognition, adjective, verb, English, Macedonian I. INTRODUCTION Adjectives are parts of speech that describe the noun, while verbs name actions, but the process of zero derivation, which by definition means deriving a new lexeme that belongs to a new lexical (sub) category, with the same form, and with a similar, expanded meaning, makes the lexemes close to each other by connecting them cognitively. Namely, like in every kind of learning, so in this, the cognitive approach is very successful and productive, when on the basis of the meaning of the source word, we conceive the new lexeme. Most, if not all, cognitive linguists agree with Lakoff and Johnson (1980), who say that metaphor is the basic element in our categorization of the world and in the thinking processes. Therefore, metaphor is used as a tool for semantic expansion of the word, when from one domain, the meaning of one lexeme is mapped into another domain. In that way, even the most distant and superficially non- connectible meanings are connected. People learn by finding similarities between the new words and the prototype of the given category, and this leads to the understanding that the word meaning is analysed on the basis of its similarity with the prototype. According to Rosch (1977)’s research, all semantic variants of one lexeme are connected with the prototype through closer and more distant links by using metaphor, while the participants in the conversation act understand the abstract concepts by using their physical experience. In English, Bauer (1983) is only one of the many authors who talks about zero derivation and lists some zero derived forms from adjective to verb, such as: better, dirty, empty, faint, open, right, total (p. 226). This transfer from one to another category is explained with a zero morph, whose existence is claimed by some linguists when they try to explain the functional difference between homophones and these new formations. The explanation is that when there is no obvious change in the word form there is an affix that marks that change. For instance, empty does not have an obvious affix but it has a zero morph, which comes at the end of the word and the result is empty + Ø, thus marking the word as a verb. It is needless to say that the zero morph is a controversial issue, because it is accepted in inflectional cases when paralleling the other forms in a paradigm requires an affix. According to Saeed (1997), the linguistic knowledge is part of the general cognition, and the cognitive linguists emphasise the difference between formal and functional approach towards the language (p. 299). The first, formal approach is often connected with the understanding that the knowledge of linguistic structures and rules forms an autonomous model, independent of the other mental processes of attention, memory and thinking. For the other, functional approach, distinguishing linguistic levels harms our language conceptions, because syntax can never be independent of semantics and pragmatics. ISSN 1799-2591 Theory and Practice in Language Studies, Vol. 4, No. 12, pp. 2455-2459, December 2014 © 2014 ACADEMY PUBLISHER Manufactured in Finland. doi:10.4304/tpls.4.12.2455-2459 © 2014 ACADEMY PUBLISHER