A Cognitive Approach To Functional Shifting Of Word-class

Functional shifting (FS) of word-class is one kind of very important grammar phenomenon, both in Chinese and in English. Especially in recent years, more and more"副+名"structures appeared in Chinese spoken language, journalistic language, network language, as well as more and more zero-derivation appeared in English ,which arousing many linguists' interests and study.There are five chapters in this dissertation, apart from the conclusion.The first chapter defines the concept of"FS of word-class", based on the summarization of word-class study on modern Chinese. We point out that"multiple functions"of a word can be classified as typical functions and non-typical functions. Those who deviate from typical functions can be regarded as FS. We also point out that the process of a word's"flexible use infrequently→flexible use frequently→conversion"is a continuum. It is also a process from quantitative change to qualitative change, which reflected varying degrees of FS.Chapter 2 comes up with four kinds of categories: objective characteristic category, objective prototype category, subjective characteristic category, subjective prototype category. We take word-class category as subjective prototype category, but it can be regarded as characteristic category by more subjective strategy.Chapter 3 describes roughly the FS between nouns, adjectives and verbs, classifying three types of FS: functional gaining, functional losing, and functional transforming. We picture the process of FS.After reviewed the theory of word-class continuum proposed by the former scholars, chapter 4 conceives of a ring-form continuum of word-class, which means that nouns and verbs are not the two poles of the word-class continuum, but link from beginning to end. An analysis is made from the perspectives of nouns' spatiality feature, verbs' timeliness feature and adjectives' quantitative feature.The last chapter, from the perspective of cognitive linguistics, analyzes FS briefly. We arrive at a conclusion that the conversion of salient profile in a same cognitive domain is the deep rationality of FS, and the prototypical feature of semantic category is the semantic basis of FS.