A Cognitive Analysis Of Conversion

Conversion is a one of the most productive methods to form new words, which refers to the phenomenon that one word is used as a member of another grammatical category without any change in form. Unlike other word-forming methods, conversion does not request for any change in form, besides, a lot of words can be categorized in two or more grammatical categories, therefore, it is hard to assess the directionality, mechanism and specific model of conversion. This thesis is based on cognitive linguistics theories such as conceptual categorization, construal and metonymy to discuss the directionality, phenomenon, mechanism and models of conversion through diachronic and synchronic approaches.At the beginning, this thesis presents types of conversion, especially three major conversions:verb to noun, noun to verb and adjective to verb conversion. Further on it discusses the reasons for the occurrence of directionality and also suggests two criteria to judge the directionality of conversion:diachronic and synchronic criteria. The first criterion is based on historical data and etymology, while the latter contains four main ways:semantic dependence, frequency of usage, semantic complexity, and change on stress.Then, conceptual categorization theory provides explanation for the essence of conversion. Prototype theory admits the fuzziness of boundaries between different categories, as well as a gradience of category membership, which leads to the deduction that word classes have central and peripheral members. Conversion is the process that the converted word loses some prototypical features of the original category and gets some new prototypical features of another category. The original word usually belongs to the basic level while the converted word belongs to the peripheral level.Thirdly, the mechanism of conversion is interweaved mental construal processes, including changes of prominence, mental scanning, reification and actionalizing, which is especially obvious in conversion between nouns and verbs. A word’s meaning is not only determined by its conceptual content, but also how the content is construed, therefore the mechanism of conversion is changes of mental construal.At last, the specific functioning model of conversion is metonymy, a basic characteristic of cognition, which is to use the easy-understood, salient part to stand for the whole or other parts of the whole. This thesis analyzes the conversion model of nouns, verbs and adjectives based on this theory, and presents relatively reasonable explanations.In summary, this thesis investigates the reasons for the occurrence of directionality and major criteria to determine it. It also provides a comprehensive analysis of conversion adopting relative cognitive theories. Hopefully, it will make a contribution to the studies on this phenomenon.