An ECM-based Study Of Verbal Nominalization In English

As one of the most common linguistic phenomena in English,verbal nominalization has attracted plenty of attention from scholars of different linguistic schools.However,restricted by research perspectives or methodologies,most previous studies have shortcomings or limitations in certain aspect.Structuralist school neglects the exploration of meaning revealed by nominal structure,while they focus on description and analysis of the surface structure of nominalization.Transformational-generative school fails to focus attention on the relation between nominalization and context,while they consider nominalization as the result of changes in syntactic structure.Systemic-functional approach explores nominalization from the perspective of grammatical metaphor,which makes the study systematic and thorough.However,they can not uncover the motivation of nominalization for they have not taken cognitive ability of human beings into consideration.Based on conceptual reification,cognitive school unfolds a more systematic and thorough research on nominalization,which provides a new paradigm for nominalization study.Nevertheless,there are still certain deficiencies in the exploration of relevant problems,such as how the semantic meanings of different verbs change in nominalization,what the semantic characteristics of various nominals are.Based on previous studies,the thesis primarily adopts methods of qualitative analysis and introspective analysis in this study.Within the framework of Event-domain Cognitive Model,cognitive construals on English verbal nominalization are carried out by combining construal operations and cognitive theories.The study classifies common English verbs into behavioral verbs and mental verbs.Meanwhile,it focuses on the process of semantic profiling and derivation which these two types of verbs have undergone in nominalization.This thesis endeavors to summarize the semantic characteristics of various nominals,which can provide certain enlightenment for English teaching and learning.Human beings perceive the world in terms of space and time.Based on these two dimensions,human beings interact with the physical world,which brings them the conceptualization of entities and relations.Entities occupying certain space arerepresented by noun category and relations extending in time are represented by verb category in language system.Nouns profile entities with spatiality which is mainly presented by quantifiers.Verbs profile actions with temporality which is primarily manifested by tenses.Verbal nominalization is a process in which an action is reified as an entity.And its essence is the spatialization of the temporality of actions.It is the creativity of human beings and the flexibility of language system itself that make the phenomenon come into being.According to the analyses and generalization of relevant instances,the major findings of this study can be summarized as follows:Firstly,those behavioral verbs possessing high transitivity and high frequency of use are generally nominalized by zero-derivation.They maximize the range of objects that linguistic symbols can represent with the least units,which embodies economy principle of language.Moreover,zero-derivation nominalization offers an opportunity for presenting various basic actions of human beings by means of describing static entities.Typical verbs that co-occur with zero-derivational nominals are have,give,take,bring,etc.Secondly,most verbs are nominalized by adding derivational suffixes to represent various relations in which entities are existent.The most prominent function of derivational nominalization is to convert dynamic actions extending in time into static entities existing in space.Derivational nominals greatly increase the ways of nominal representation.Information related to verbs can be compressed into nominals in derivational nominalization,which causes derivational nominals to possess high degree of generality.They may refer to the reified action or the process,the result and the instrument of the action.Thirdly,gerund,as one of non-finite verbs,primarily expresses the state between entities and actions.In the continuum of verbal nominalization,it is a member that retains most features of verb.Nominals of this type usually correspond to experiences in daily life and thus represent abstract situations that have already happened.When gerund serves as object in a sentence,it tends to co-occur with predicate verb possessing static sense,such as finish,enjoy,avoid,etc.Fourthly,infinitive plays a unique role in reference in language system of English.Moreover,the core function of it is to represent specific actions that have not happenedyet.When infinitive serves as object in a sentence,it tends to co-occur with predicate verb possessing strong intentionality,such as agree,decide,want,etc.