| Nouns and verbs are two important grammatical categories in most languages, and the conversion between nouns and verbs has been paid much attention by researchers. In fact, English language is accompanied by noun-verb conversion, which still remains an important source for expanding vocabulary. The study of noun-verb conversion is a very interesting language subject and can help us to get a better understanding of the nature of language creativity.After a brief literature review, some limitations of previous studies are found. Firstly, observational adequacy is needed. All the examples the scholars used mainly come from the 1300words collected by Clark & Clark. More up to date material is needed. Secondly, descriptive adequacy is needed. Most studies explore noun-verb conversion in isolated words or sentences, ignoring the levels of phrases and discourses, frequency and distribution of denominal verbs in different texts as well. Thirdly, explanatory adequacy is needed. Since conversion of part of speech involves many aspects of linguistic research, we can not confine our study to a single angle or a single theory. A multi-dimension study is needed for a comprehensive description and explanation of it. The researcher should apply the related theories to explore the relevant angles.Compared with the previous studies, the dissertation makes contributions in following aspects. Firstly, to make up for the observational inadequacy of previous studies, the author tries to develop a denominal verb bank, the establishment of which proceeds as follows:based on British National Corpus (BNC), the author picks up those words which are tagged and only tagged as nouns in the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English (new edition). And then the author searches those selected nouns in BNC to find out those nouns which have been used as verbs without any change of form, namely denominal verbs. The library will provide a lot of up to date noun-verb conversion cases, which will help the further study. Secondly, with the help of this library, by analyzing the frequency and distribution of denominal verbs in different texts, this dissertation helps to achieve descriptive adequacy. According to data collected from BNC, it is found that most of parent nouns are individual nouns while most of denominal verbs are used as transitive verbs. Thirdly, in order to make up for the explanatory inadequacy of previous studies, based on the systemic functional linguistics and cognitive linguistics, this dissertation puts forward a cognitive-functional model to study this language phenomenon in a broad way. To be more specific, this research combines the context theory proposed by functional linguists and metaphor theory contended by cognitive linguists to account for noun-verb conversion. Essentially, noun-verb conversion is cross-categorization, resulted by the combined force of inner metaphor and external context. And this model also accounts for the distribution law of denominal verbs which we gain from denominal verbs library.And the organization of this dissertation is as follows:In chapter one, the author introduces the related background for this study, elaborates the significance of study, sets research objectives, and illustrates the research methods.In chapter two, a brief literature review on the important studies is presented. This part reviews the available materials and sorts them into four categories:grammatical perspective, pragmatic perspective, cognitive perspective, comparative perspective. And then the author concludes the limitations of the previous studies, namely observational inadequacy, descriptive inadequacy, explanatory inadequacy.In chapter three, how to develop the denominal verbs library is introduced. The process of data collection from BNC will be elaborated. The author will give the enough information to BNC and selection of denominal verbs. And then with the help of auto identification, the author will then judge whether or not those nouns have been used as verbs with her knowledge of grammar.In chapter four, the author will show and discuss distribution characteristics of denominal verbs. Firstly, the author would outline the general distribution law for denominal verbs. And then, a description of parent nouns and denominal verbs will be given. After that, a detailed description of distribution law in different texts will be presented.In chapter five, the author would establish a cognitive-functional model to explore what noun-verb conversion is, how it works as well as how it is understood. The prototype theory of categorization is used to unveil the essence of noun-verb conversion. And then, the author will combine context theory proposed by systemic functional linguists and metaphor theory and prototype theory of categorization by cognitive linguists to explain its working mechanism. And the data results collected from BNC will be accounted for here.In chapter six, the author comes to the conclusion. And this part is composed of two parts. One is about the major findings in the study. There are mainly three findings in this dissertation. Firstly, observational adequacy is achieved through the establishment of denominal verbs library. Secondly, a comprehensive description of distribution and frequency of denominal verbs is given to make up for the descriptive inadequacy of previous study. And the distribution laws of them are concluded. Thirdly, a cognitive-functional model has been established to explain what denominal verbs are, how they work. And this model also accounts for the distribution law of denominal verbs, which we conclude from the date collected from BNC. And the other part concerns the limitations of this study as well as some suggestions for further study.
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