Functional Shift Of Noun

Based on the former scholars' research on functional shift of noun, this paper deals with noun and its relation with other parts of words, especially with adjective and with verb from the semantic of noun and noun's position on the continuum in the word class. This study points out that though noun is an automatic concept and have the reference in the objective world or in the subjective world, comparing with adjective and verb, but people always explain nouns by means of statements when they understand or interpret the semantic of a noun. So noun is not static in semantic, but dynamic. The semantic of noun often contains the natural meaning and action meaning, and in the ground of that, the paper discusses the shift between the thing meaning, the natural meaning and the action meaning. Besides, we still expound the similarity between noun and verb, and find out the transitional part of speech between noun and verb: Timeliness noun and noun-verb, and demonstrates noun and verb is not the two poles of the word class continuum, but linked from beginning to end. In this new continuum, the counter-clockwise shift of any two word class is relatively easy, but it is difficult in the case of opposite direction. Finally, this study touches upon the noncategorization of noun, and argues that the functional shift of noun is a result of noncategorization of noun.