Computer-aided Analysis Of The Conversion Of Proper Nouns

The focus of this thesis is to make quantitative analyses of the English words from proper nouns,i.e. converted proper nouns (CPNs).Although thereareonly a limited number of CPNs in English,their significance can never be undervalued. The study focuses on properties of CPNs,their classification,ways and degrees of conversion as well as morphological and semantic changes in the conversion process. To find a current usage of CPNs and their characteristics of distribution in different registers,this study also makes a comparative and statistical analysis of the frequencies and distributions of CPNs in LOB (A+B),BROWN (A+B),NEC and MEE. SNOBAL 4 and SPSS 10.0 are applied to process the data provided in the corpora,and Chi-square tests have been utilized to analyze the results obtained.The research has proved the importance of background cultures of proper nouns and analyzed their influence on the extended meaning of CPNs in the process of conversion. CPNs take the highest percentage of frequency but the lowest in coverage in MEE,and the corpus of press reportage LOB (A+B) has a wider coverage of CPNs. There are a higher percentage of the frequencies of CPNs from places in BROWN (A+B),from people in MEE.