N-V Conversion In Contemporary English And Its Significance To Vocabulary Expansion In ELT

Three basic elements of language are pronunciation, grammar, and vocabulary. One of the famous linguists David Wilkins(1972)once said that, "without grammar very little can be conveyed, without vocabulary nothing can be conveyed." Vocabulary plays an indispensable role in language teaching. A language learner can master grammar rules by hard work within the shortest possible time whereas without effective approaches he can not enlarge his vocabulary in a short time. So far various ways of enlarging vocabulary has been explored.The expansion of vocabulary in modern English depends chiefly on word-formation. Word-formation which has already appeared in Senior Middle School Students'textbook, has become a hot topic in recent years. It is also easy to see articles or chapters about word-formation in academic periodicals or books in linguistics or lexicology. The three major processes of word-formation are compounding, affixation and conversion. The minor processes of word-formation mainly include shortening, blending, and backformation.Among the major processes of word-formation, according to Pyles and Algeo(1982). words produced through affixation constitute 30%to 40% of the total number of new words; compounding yields 28% to 30% of all the new words; conversion gives us 26% of the new vocabulary. Thus, conversion plays an important part in coining new words.The essence of conversion is that a form of a word is interpreted as a word of another part of speech, that is, it gets the corresponding meaning, grammatical categories, functions, a place in the sentence and a capacity of combining with certain words and word-building. With the development of science and technology, the production of new words and extinction of old words becomes an unavoidable phenomenon in society. However, conversion is not only the way of creation of new words, but also the ways of enlarging vocabulary in ELT. which the thesis aims to demonstrate. The thesis focuses on N-V conversion, one major type of conversion, and its significance to vocabulary expansion in ELT.Firstly introduction is introduced. Secondly, the previous studies are briefly overviewed from three different aspects, i.e. conversion in lexicology, conversion in grammar and conversion in linguistics:secondly the definition of conversion is given, and thirdly the features of conversion are introduced. Thirdly conversion to verb from three aspects is stated. That is conversion from noun to verb, conversion from adjective to verb and conversion from adverb to verb, which gives a panoramic view of conversion to verb. Fourthly, a research related to N-V conversion is displayed in details. Fifthly, it gives an account of the significance of N-V conversion to vocabulary expansion. The significance to vocabulary expansion can be reflected in the new classifications of 462 nouns. N-V conversion is classified into six different groups:and after each section, there is a comparison made between Longman dictionary of contemporary English and Oxford advanced learners'English-Chinese dictionary, then it comes to a summary. In the last chapter, there is a conclusion.The whole thesis lists 462 nouns among the top 3000 words of spoken and written English, and their verbs converted from nouns, which shows the expansion of vocabulary and facilitates ELT.