An Empirical Corpus-based Study Of The Conversion Of Chinese Verbs To Nouns

Verb-noun conversion refers to the phenomenon that verbs are directly used as nouns without any change of word form. In Chinese, this language phenomenon has attracted great attention from linguists. After sorting out the concerned research, several limitations can be detected. First, most scholars mainly resort to some typical examples instead of some up-to-date materials to support their research, so observational adequacy is in need. Second, most studies lack the description of distribution and frequency law of deverbal nouns in different texts, so descriptive adequacy is needed. Third, verb-noun conversion is involved in many aspects of linguistic research, but most researches are confined to a single angle or a single theory, so explanatory adequacy is required.Based on previous studies, this thesis is organized as follows:Chapter one gives a brief introduction of the related research background and the research methodology, elaborates the significance and objectives of the study, points out the central topic and illustrates the research procedures.Chapter two presents a literature review of the concerned study by dividing them into three important periods with their own focus and concluding the limitations of the previous studies.Chapter three makes up for observational inadequacy of previous study. In this chapter, how to develop the deverbal nouns library is introduced. The tools CCD and CCL used in data collection will be elaborated. Due to the lack of auto identification, some recognized criteria in judging whether or not those verbs have been used as nouns will be introduced. This will make the material in the library more reliable.In Chapter four, the author will discuss distribution characteristics of deverbal nouns. The author will first outline the general distribution law for deverbal nouns and then a detailed description of distribution law in different genres will be presented, which helps to fulfill descriptive adequacy.In Chapter five, the author will apply the functional-typological approach to account for the above-mentioned data, which can do a better job in achieving explanatory adequacy. The Markedness Theory of Typology will be used to discover the features of the deverbal nouns and the Context Theory of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) will be adopted to explain the distribution frequency law of deverbal nouns in different texts.Chapter six is the conclusion of the dissertation. It concludes the major findings of this study, points out its own limitations and proposes suggestions for further research.