A Corpus-based Study Of The Salience Of Motor Image Of Body Part Terms And Its Transmission In The Noun-verb Conversion

Noun-verb conversion remains an existent phenomenon in English language, while the conversion of body part terms and human nouns plays a significant role in people's cognitive activities. However, all studies focus on the illustrations of noun-verb conversion from the perspectives such as word-formation, logic-semantic relation and metaphorization, the demonstration of this phenomenon from the perspective of linguistic categorization is woefully ignored. It is at the basic level of categorization that people conceptualize things as perceptual and functional gestalts and the basic level is where the largest amount of information about an item can be obtained with the least cognitive effort (Rosch, 1976). Basic level categories are functionally and epistemologically primary with respect to the following factors: gestalt perception, image formation, motor movement, knowledge organization, ease of cognitive processing, and ease of linguistic expression. As basic level terms, the body part terms possess the characteristic of motor movement, based on which various motor images can be generated. From the perspective of the cognitive linguistics, the thesis argues that the noun-verb conversion of body part terms discloses the course that the motor image of body nouns gets the salience and is transmitted to the different target cognitive domains, which proves the importance of the theory of basic level categories in the process of people's cognition of the world. This thesis has sorted out the different characteristics of the motor image of 23 body part terms by using the BNC (British National Corpus) when they are transmitted to the target domains, which reveals the mental image basis of noun-verb conversion.Starting with the introduction of the significance of the present study as well as the inadequacy of previous work on noun-verb conversion of body part terms, the present thesis approaches the noun-verb conversion of body part terms from perspective of linguistic categorization, the basic level theory in particular. Based on the theoretical ground of this thesis, the theory of basic level categories, including the conception, the characteristics, the function of the basic level categories and the basic level terms, the thesis explores in detail the motor image of body part terms and its transmission in the noun-verb conversion from the angle of linguistic categorization and deals with the exceptions. Finally the concluding remarks are brought to the effect that the body part category belongs to the basic level category, so that the noun-verb conversion of body-part terms can be explained by the theory of basic level category. It is stated in this thesis that the noun-verb conversion of body-part terms is not only concerning the research of lexics claming it a tool of word-formation, but also reveals the mental process that the motor image transmitting from the source domain to the target domain, which possesses the mental image basis.It is an attempt in this thesis to explain the common linguistic issues by applying the theory of basic level categories. The significance of this research is that it initiates a new angle to explore the common linguistic issues, so that the importance of cognitive linguistics, the basic level category in particular, will be much concerned. In the future, the research is hoped to go deeper in this field and enables the argumentation to be being perfect. Furthermore, the theory of basic level categories is expected to be attached more importance to and be applied to explain more linguistic phenomena.