A Cognitive Approach To Verbal Nominalization

Verbal nominalization refers to the conceptualization of action. The process of verbal nominalization is one of transferring gradually the action to a dynamic state, an abstract concept and even to the persons or things concerning the action. Nominalization is one of the most popular and complex linguistic phenomena in English. Linguists of various schools such as traditional grammar, structural grammar, transformational-generative grammar and systemic-functional grammar all make descriptions about the phenomenon in brief or detail and try to explain it from different points of view. But the study of traditional grammar and structural grammar is not profound enough, and transformational -generative grammar only offers us simple operating modes, which is lack of persuasion. As to Halliday's systemic-functional grammar, although it contributes a lot to linguistics, it doesn't offer adequate cognitive analysis. Morphological features and syntactic restraints have usually been categorized in syntactic concerns while analysis of their inner cognitive structure has been neglected.This thesis makes a study of verbal nominalization from a cognitive perspective, probing into the cognitive mode of verbal nominalization, analyzing the cognitive difference between its two subcategories in morphological forms and, explaining the temporal and aspectual meaning of English verbs as well as their transferring forms of subjective and objective meanings.According to cognitive linguists, the semantic difference between count nouns and mass nouns lies in human cognition of the boundary of an objective entity. This thesis maintains that the cognitive difference between two morphological forms (verbal nouns and deverbal nouns) of...