A Corpus-based Contrastive Study Of Nominalizations In English And Chinese

Generally speaking, different languages represent the experienced world in a congruent way, for example, nouns represent things and verbs represent processes. However, the representation sometimes works in an incongruent way, for example, verbs for processes. The incongruent representation is a kind of reconstruing of experiences. Nouns and verbs are important grammatical categories in all languages, and the dynamic transcategorization between nouns and verbs also draws much attention of researchers. Different linguistic schools approach nominalizations from different perspectives, and make their contributions to the studies of nominalizations. However, the previous studies are still inadequate in the following aspects. Firstly, although there are many studies on nominalization, studies specifying deverbal nominalizations are comparatively rare, and there is no English-Chinese contrastive study on deverbal nominalizations yet. Secondly, most studies only focus on lexical nominalizations, but neglect the other types of nominalizations. Thirdly, most studies explore nominalizations in isolated words or sentences, neglecting not only the behaviors of nominalizations in phrases and discourses, but also the motivations of the behaviors. The present study aims to make an English-Chinese contrastive analysis on deverbal nominalizations in different contexts, and to answer the following research questions:A. What are the similarities and differences in classification, formation and degrees of nominalizations between nominalizations in English and nominalizations in Chinese?B. What are the similarities and differences in functional organizations (type, specification, quantification and grounding) of nominalization phrases in English and Chinese?C. What are the similarities and differences in syntactic functions of nominalizations in English and Chinese?D. What are the functions of nominalizations in English and Chinese in building discourse semantics? What are the distributions of nominalizations in different genres of discourses?Based on the answers to the above research questions, the present study will provide an answer to the more abstract research question"What is the nature of nominalizations?"The present research puts forward the cognitive-functional model on the basis of the principles of cognitive grammar and functional grammar, which theoretically supports the contrastive analysis. The present study adopts a corpus-based (FLOB&LCMC) research method to describe, categorize and contrast nominalizations in English and Chinese from the real and natural data in corpuses, and this study comes to the following conclusions.A. Various kinds of nominalizations can be found in English and Chinese, which shows that conceptual reification is a universal principle in human cognition.B. Nominalizations in English have a higher degree of frequency and entrenchment, which indicates that native English speakers more easily reconstrue processes as things in representing and communicating the experienced world.C. The cognitive function of a nominalization phrase is to instantiate an untypical thing. There are some divergences in semantic functional organizations of nominalization phrases in English and Chinese, which result from different language systems and different cultural and thinking patterns.D. There are similarities and differences in syntactic functions of nominalizations in English and Chinese. As the participants of a clause, nominalizations tend to be in end-weight positions. Verbs which designate relational processes and psychological processes tend to collocate with nominalizations. English nominalizations have a rich variety of formal markers which provide convenient ways to package information in nominal groups. While Chinese nominalizations lack formal markers and are limited in packaging information, but this limitation is made up by the flexible uses of verbs in Chinese. The features of nominalizations in English and Chinese mentioned above provide evidence for the statement that English is a static language and Chinese is a dynamic language.E. The distribution of nominalizations is closely related to the types of discourses. In addition, nominalizations act as degree markers of the discourses formality. Furthermore, due to their special interpersonal meaning and textual meaning, nominalizations in English and Chinese play a critical role in building discourse semantics,The study demonstrates the fact that the nature of nominalization is transcategorization, i.e. a process is conceptually reconstrued as a thing. The pragmatic and semantic features of nominalizations in phrases, clauses and discourses provide sufficient evidence for the cognitive nature of nominalization. The contrastive study of nominalizations in English and Chinese reveals the universal rules of human cognition and the divergences of different language systems and different cultures.In comparison with the previous studies, the present research makes contributions in the following aspects.Firstly, the present research has made a worthwhile attempt in English-Chinese contrastive study of nominalizations, which explores the nature of nominalization from a cross-cultural perspective.Secondly, the present study constructs a cognitive-functional model concerning nominalization study, which provides a coherent theoretical framework for different types of nominalizations.Lastly, the present corpus-based research method breaks through the tradition in nominalization study which is mainly based on introspective data.