Streszczenie:
This paper analyzes disputative adjectives in the contemporary Serbian language. The main goal was to investigate conversion as a type of word formation from the perspective of semantic changes, which as a result lead to conversion of one part of speech to another (in this case, nouns to prepositions). The separate analysis of semantic content of all seven nouns and prepositions formed by conversion process show that these nouns during the process of acquiring prepositional function do not undergo desemantization, i.e. grammaticalization of nouns (more frequently called), but they go through the process of pre-sematization of their semantic content. It is concluded that the relations between nouns and converted prepositions cannot be treated as homonymy, but as grammatical polysemy. In order to undergo the process of conversion nouns must meet certain semantic criteria described in this article.
