A Contrastive Study On English And Chinese Lexical Nominalization

This dissertation attempts to revise and supplement the theory of nominalization itself instead of challenging those scholars opposed to nominalization. The study of nominalization in English is well developed: almost all the linguistic schools concern themselves more or less with this topic. However, they seem to differ in the scope of nominalization, i.e. whether it includes conversion, though this disagreement does not cause any controversy. In the Chinese linguistic circle, the heated discussions over nominalization are from the 1950s to the early 1990s. Zhu Dexi is opposed to "nominalization", while other scholars support nominalization. The focus of their fierce discussions is on the word class of the verbs and adjectives present at the place of subject or object in a Chinese sentence.My major contributions in this dissertation include: (1) Nominalization must have some morphological marker; thus, conversion could be put aside to avoid unnecessary confusion; (2) A new definition of nominalization for both English and Chinese is proposed ?nominalization is the process of change from the non-nominal linguistic structure to the nominal linguistic structure by adding a certain morphological marker to the former; (3) An image schema, the MOTION-REST Schema, is proposed to explicate the nature of lexical nominalization from the perspective of cognitive linguistics.This dissertation is divided into seven parts: the first part offers a survey on the study of English and Chinese nominalization respectively, and points out their theoretical advantages and disadvantages whenever possible, thus showing the purpose of my own dissertation; the second part concerns the contrastive basis for English and Chinese lexical nominalization, resolving the problems of morphology and affixes in Chinese; the third part makes a diachronic study on the evolution of the morphological markers in English and Chinese lexical nominalization, indicating their respective origins; the fourth part shows their universal classification and points out their similarities and differences; the fifth part proposes an image schema, by which the nature of nominalization could be explained from the perspective of cognitive linguistics; the sixth part is about the stylistic function of the English and Chinese nominalizing affixes, involving some statistics on English nominalization provided by Longman-Lancaster Corpus and London-Lund Corpus; the seventh part is the conclusion, suggesting the theoretical and practical value of nominalization in English and Chinese. An appendix at the end of this dissertation lists some frequently used nominalizing affixes in English and Chinese gathered during the process of composition.