A Diachronic Typological Approach To The Development Of Verb/Noun Heterosemy In Present-day English

Conversion is a productive word-formation process of Present-day English,leading to many ‘heterosemous’ words that express related meanings across multiple word classes.Especially common is verb/noun heterosemy,as in flow or hand.Verb/noun heterosemy has been studied from diverse perspectives in the previous literature but its diachronic development has remained largely unresearched.Therefore,this thesis investigates the diachronic development of verb/noun heterosemy in Present-day English and analyzes the change of verb/noun boundary permeability from a diachronic typological approach.A large sample of 1,000 verb/noun heterosemous candidates is collected from the Corpus of Historical American English(COHA,1920s-2010s)and after manual screening with the etymological reference to the Oxford English Dictionary,877 heterosemous words are finally retained.Then the permeability index in different periods for each item is calculated.The thesis uses quantitative methods to analyze the diachronic change in boundary permeability of the selected 877 words.Analysis of mean permeability shows that the average permeability index of the 877 heterosemous words has increased significantly over the past 100 years(p < 0.0001);analysis of linear modelling indicates that the items undergoing change in the 877 heterosemous words significantly tend towards an increase in permeability(χ~2 = 9.93,p < 0.005);time-series clustering analysis also suggests that among the heterosemous words which have undergone regular changes,53.2% of them are subject to increasing development.In addition,32.9% have been decreasing,and only 8.4% have been first increasing and then decreasing,5.4% first decreasing and then increasing.Overall,the boundary permeability of English verb/noun heterosemy has been increasing in Present-day English.It can be concluded that over the last century the degree of English verb/noun heterosemy has been increasing,and English is still in the process of a long-term drift towards greater boundary permeability.In other words,the word class boundary of English has been getting softer and it is now still approaching an analytical language.From a diachronic typological perspective,it can be concluded that the higher a language’s tolerance for heterosemy,the higher its level of permeability is,and the more analytic a language is on the syntheticity-analyticity continuum.As the verb/noun boundary permeability in Present-day English has been increasing,it can be predicted that Present-day English is still developing towards an analytical language type.