A Study Of Motivations, Conditions And Mechanisms Of Noun Verbalization

Noun verbalization (also conversion from nouns to verbs, or denominal verbs as some other scholars may call it), as the term indicates, is to use a noun as a verb without any morphological change of form. This paper analyzes the productive processes of noun verbalization and explores the motivations, conditions and mechanisms of it on the basis of some previous researches. The previous research mainly focuses on semantic or lexical studies from the perspective of pragmatics, although a few studies have look at the noun verbalization from an experimental perspective (Kelly, 1998). This paper holds the view that derivation from nouns to verbs has yet to be examined from the perspective of cognition. It is a natural result of cognition and has much to do with the way we perceive the real world. As Lakoff and Johnson (1980) richly document, much of our understanding of everyday experience is structured in terms of metaphor, which is a vital part of cognition. Thus the study of noun verbalization is impossible without a collaborate effort between cognitive theories and linguistic theories of pragmatics.The use of noun verbalization has its motivations. Originally it is regarded as one form of rhetoric and people use it to achieve certain rhetorical effect. The recent research on noun verbalization, however, has showed that the Economical Principle is observed in syntactic constructing, consciously or unconsciously, as well as to achieve an effect of vividness or novelty. The expressions tend to be more concise. Furthermore, in certain context, people use a noun as a verb to produce a desired pragmatic effect. And another motivation behind noun verbalization may be to plug lexical gaps.Despite the fact that some scholars holds the view that there is a trend of "preponderance of nouns over verbs," not all nouns can be convertedinto verbs. The use of noun verbalization should be based on the mutual knowledge of the speaker and listener and constrained to the time and space of utterance. In addition, a verb that derives from a noun can also be considered unacceptable if it is precisely synonymous or is homonymous with another well-established one and could be confused with it.In cognitive point of view, word meaning lies in the process of conceptualization. The meaning of the semantic form relies not only on the content of the conception, but also on how it is perceived and understood. Similarly, for the same event or scene, the same person, not to say different persons, if he perceives from different perspectives, may have different understanding and choose different expressive forms, hence the different syntactic structure. That's to say, the way people perceive the real world plays a critical part in constructing a sentence. Different perspectives, points of attention or degrees of salience may conjure up quite different images in the mind even for the same thing or event, thus the creation of different expressive forms.Modern language tends to be more and more concise and the cognitive mechanism of human beings makes it possible. Lakoff (1980) holds the view that much of our understanding of everyday experience is structured in terms of metaphor. The essence of metaphor is understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another. Thus, the only similarities relevant to metaphor are similarities as experienced or perceived by people. He may create similarities between two seemingly quite different things and forms association, or perceive one of the properties of a thing as more salient than the others and therefore highlight it in a syntactic form.This paper points out that the usage of noun verbalization has a lot to do with context and it is contextual expression. Only in a particular context can a verb that derives from a noun be correctly interpreted. Or itwill cause ambiguousness. So, in this paper, the context-dependent features of noun verbalization are presented in great detail.In brief, this paper, guided by the Theory of Similarity and the Salience Principle together with the Blending Theory, classifies the nouns that can be converted into verbs and explores in detail its motivations, conditions and mechanisms.