Denominal Verbs:Construal And Acquisition

This dissertation makes exploratory attempts to bridge the gap between denominal verb study and denominal verb acquisition with a major focus on the factors that affect EFL learners' thinking process of creating a novel denominal verb.The study begins with the convertibility between nouns and verbs and the converting mechanisms.Viewed from their syntactic structures,nouns can be converted into verbs by adding or deleting typical syntactic features.From a cognitive grammatical view,when a noun converts to a verb,it requests a reconstruction of the whole cognitive concept,making a part of the frame into a complete one,and activating the whole cognitive domain.The base noun can get the functions of the verb by way of the interaction of metonymy and metaphor and their mutual influence.The source meaning is used as the carrier to activate the target meaning,thus making the target meaning salient.To facilitate EFL learners' mastery of denominal verb studies,the pilot study of this research provided a list of 763 denominal verbs extracted from 2200 core defining words in Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English and classified them into ten semantic categories1 based on the classifying method of Clark&Clark(1979).This verb list and the category classification of denominal verbs act as the cornerstone of the empirical study and will benefit all Chinese EFL learners in their acquisition of denominal verbs.Of the ten semantic categories,three main categories-locatum verbs,location verbs and instrument verbs-which might cause ambiguity to learners,were analyzed in the aspects of semantic relations of location and the true or pseudo natures of denominal verbs.A corpus-based case study is conducted on the semantic differences between denominal verbs and common verbs.A typical category of denominal verbs—sensory denominal verbs are compared as an example with their counterpart common sensory verbs in terms of semantic parameters and corpus data.Denominal verbs are undergoing a continuum of idiomatization,and their number has increased in recent years.In the empirical study,two issues concerning EFL learners' use of denominal verbs are discussed,the first issue being their attitudes towards the use of denominal verbs,and the second being the identification of the possible denominal verb forms learners would create and the frequency and preference of learners' applying various processes.The first issue is dealt with in the form of an investigation about the reasons and conditions with which EFL learners use denominal verbs,their comprehending process,their attitudes towards using denominal verbs and way of acceptance.The result shows that their using denominal verbs to express ideas needs to meet certain conditions,and the main reason that they choose to use denominal verbs is their simplicity.The second issue is tackled through two verb-creating tests.The results show that EFL learners have basic pragmatic inferring ability,and that their calculating and processing are mainly related with the semantic category distribution of denominal verbs,the interaction between processes and the affixation preference and productivity.All processes are involved in the same semantic categories,yet they are not equally distributed.Semantic category distribution of denominal verbs is the key factor that exerts impact on EFL learners'thinking process of creating novel denominal verbs.EFL learners tend to use conversion when they create a novel donominal verb rather than other existing verbal affixes.To sum up,this study demonstrates the influential factors of denominal verb formation in EFL learners'thinking process and provides evidence that the grasp of the knowledge of denominal verbs will contribute to learners' vocabulary acquisition.