A Study On The Construction Of Cognitive Mechanism For The Semantic Representation Of English Abstract Nouns Nominalisation

As one of the essential part of English vocabulary, nouns play an imporant role in traditional English grammar. In recent years, with the mass appearance of English news, political texts and technological texts in various English textbooks and various types of foreign language examinations, the usage frequency of English abstract nouns has gone up obviously and is more widely used than Chinese abstract nouns. For this reason, many scholars, both from overseas and domestic, study abstract nouns within traditional semantics framework. Although these studies have a theoretical guiding function to the semantic representation of English abstract nouns nominalisation, at present, they just emphasize the systematic conversion of language meaning itself. The study of abstract nouns mainly focuses on the surface study of language phenomena and the comparison between English and Chinese abstract nouns, that is, focuses on the morphological and syntactic study of English abstract nouns, not on the underlying motivation and the cognitive mechanism for the semantic representation of English abstract nouns. Therefore, the study of cognitive mechanism for the semantic representation of English abstract nouns nominalisation is both a complement of nominalisation study and a new development tendency of English abstract nouns study.In modern cognitive study, scholars study the semantic representation of English abstract nouns by virtue of theories like image schema, metaphor and metonymy within cognitive linguistics framework. On the basis of the studies done by other scholars, this thesis will, with introspection method, qualitative analysis and corpus-based analysis, have a thorough study on the construction of cognitive mechanism for the semantic representation of English abstract nouns nominalization on the basis of categorization, prototype theory, decategorization, conceptual metaphor, and construal operations, etc in cognitive linguistics. Firstly, dynamic attributes of lexical categories within prototype theory constitute the motivation for the semantic representation of abstract nouns, and this thesis builds a triangle continuum among nouns, verbs and adjectives, thus ensuring the semantic change. Secondly, dynamic construal of conceptual meaning and construal operations constitute the cognitive foundation of semantic representation mechanism. Then, in the fourth chapter, this thesis respectively studies cognitive mechanism for the semantic representation of nominalisation from four types of abstract nouns, and this thesis respectively builds related cognitive mechanism on the semantic representation for the nominalisation of the four types of abstract nouns by means of schema representation. As represented in the study, for behavioral abstract nouns, their semantic representation of nominalisation experiences a process from profiling process to profiling entities, from sequential scanning to summary scanning; for qualitative abstract nouns, they experience a process from profiling attributes to profiling entities, a process of conceptual mapping from concrete concept domain to abstract concept domain; for abstract nouns of status, they experience a conversion from prototypical reference meaning to peripheral statement meaning in a category; for inherent abstract nouns, they experience reification. From the perspective of cognitive semantics, English abstract nouns will profile different conceptual meanings in different schema constructions represented by different lexical categories. Lastly, this thesis briefly explicates the significance for the construction of cognitive mechanism and its implication on foreign language teaching and learning.Through studying, this thesis holds that grasping cognitive mechanism for the semantic representation of English abstract nouns nominalisation will greatly improve English textual reading ability in the future foreign language teaching and learning.