A Corpus-based Comparative Study On Innovations And Denominal Verbs Of Noun-verb Conversion In Modern Chinese

Word class conversion is a common phenomenon in all kinds of languages. It refers to the process whereby a word of a certain word class is shifted into another word class without the change of its form. And noun to verb conversion in Chinese has been paid much attention to by linguists. After a brief literature review, it is found that linguists have described and interpreted noun to verb conversion from the perspective of structural linguistics, transformational generative linguistics, cognitive linguistics, functional linguistics etc. These studies are very meaningful in better understanding noun to verb conversion.Language is in an open and dynamic system instead of a closed and static one. A noun has to gone through the two stages of innovation and denominal verb to complete its conversion. Innovation refers to a noun which is used as a verb temporarily, and there is no label in the dictionary. Denominal verb refers to a noun which is often used as a verb steadily. There is a tagging of verb in dictionary.Previous studies mainly focused on the interpretation of noun to verb conversion, while this thesis will try to compare the characteristics of innovation and denominal verb based on the fifth and sixth editions of Contemporary Chinese Dictionary and the CCL corpus. First, innovations will be collected from the fifth edition dictionary. Second, find out which of those innovations have become denominal verbs in the sixth edition dictionary. Third, collect linguistic data of denominal verbs and those words which remains to be innovations from CCL corpus. Then compare their frequency of using as verbs and their distribution in the9different genres. Through comparison, it is found that the frequency of denominal verbs’ using as verbs is about10times of the frequency of innovations. And their frequency has different characteristics in different genres. Finally, comparison between innovations and denominal verbs will be conducted in a cognitive view. It is found that the verb meaning of innovations is unstable which is activated only in specific situations, while the verb meaning of denominal verbs is stable and has become part of centrality of its lexical meaning.