A Cognitive Study Of Conversion In English And Chinese

Conversion has always been a hot subject in the field of linguistic research. Earlier studies mainly analyze conversion from the perspective of language with special attention to conversion between nouns and verbs. This thesis adopts the conceptual metonymy theory to analyze the cognitive mechanism in conversion between major word classes in English and Chinese and by contrast, it analyzes their similarities and differences.Conversion is a process whereby a word of a certain word-class is shifted into a word of another word-class without the addition of an affix. Conversion in English is an important means of word formation. While in Chinese conversion is often treated as a rhetorical device and there are differences among these three terms: flexible use of parts of speech, fission of word class and conversion. We hold that conversion, as a language phenomenon existing both in English and Chinese, is the reflection of people's metonymic mode of thinking.Traditionally, metonymy is viewed as a process of substituting one linguistic expression for another, or a relation in which one linguistic expression "stands for" another. The cognitive view holds that as a basic mode of thinking, metonymy is conceptual in nature and should be defined as a cognitive process in which one conceptual entity, the vehicle, provides mental access to another conceptual entity, the target, within the same idealized cognitive model. According to the relationship between the source domain and the target domain, metonymy can be divided into two types: source-in-target metonymies and target-in-source metonymies. Based on this classification of metonymy, this thesis gives a detailed analysis of the operation of metonymy mainly in conversion between nouns, verbs and adjectives. The analysis is followed by a cross-cultural comparison of metonymies in conversion in English and Chinese. Thestudy reveals that the THING FOR ACTION metonymy, ACTION FOR THING metonymy, AN ENTITY FOR A DEFINING PROPERTY metonymy, A PROPERTY FOR AN ENTITY metonymy, and RESULTANT STATE FOR ACTION metonymy exist in conversion both in English and Chinese. English and Chinese show a high degree of similarity in basic metonymic mappings and these similarities reflect that conceptual metonymies are primarily rooted in common human bodily experiences. Nevertheless cultural diversity reveals itself in the detailed instantiation of the metonymic mappings. For example, Chinese people are prone to the metonymic thinking of ACTION FOR AGENT, while English people more often follow the direction—AGENT FOR ACTION. Moreover, converted words are easier to be lexicalized in English than in Chinese. There are three reasons: firstly, being an inflectional language, English is convenient to form new words;secondly, bisyllablization and complexity of Chinese grammar lead to inconvenience in conversion;thirdly, English tends to make full use of the existent words, while Chinese tends to create new words.Conversion is motivated by people's metonymic mode of thinking with some constraints. For example, some grammatical structures may effectively constrain or activate the operation of metonymy in conversion. There are also some cognitive principles and communicative principles governing the selection of the preferred input in conversion.All in all, by a comparative study of metonymic mechanism of conversion in English and Chinese, this thesis proves that conversion is not just a language phenomenon;more importantly, it is a mode of thinking which reflects the simplification and refining of people's thinking process.