On Adjective-to-Noun Conversion In Modern Chinese Based On XIANDAI HANYU CIDIAN And Center For Chinese Linguistics PKU

Language is not in a closed or static, but an open and dynamic system. Thus, for both Chinese and English, one word may experience certain changes instead of belonging to one word class permanently. Conversion is a process whereby a word of certain word class is shifted into another word class without the change of its form. As for modern Chinese, the part of speech tagging itself had been a difficulty. It is not until the appearance of XIANDAI HANYU CIDIAN (5th edition) that it gives us a fairly comprehensive and authoritative guide.In order to fill the research gap of previous studies on conversion, this thesis stands on a new point to establish Adjective-to-Noun Conversion Corpus based on the large and reliable corpus and make a comprehensive and adequate description of adjective-to-noun conversion from the perspective of text typology. This thesis, based on XIANDAI HANYU CIDIAN (5th edition) published by Commercial Press in2010and CCL (Center for Chinese Linguistics PKU), will try to select adjective-to-noun conversion in Chinese, including the data collection, selection and collation to establish the corpus of adjective-to-noun conversion in Chinese.It will also illustrate the distribution and frequency of adjective-to-noun conversion in different text genres. Thus, the explanation on its conversion reasons will be conducted through the approach of cognitive grammar. When an adjective is converted as a noun, the profile noun will be reduced offstage to be the base while the base adjective will be the prominence onstage as the new profile to replace the whole noun phrase. The essence of its replacement is the shift between categories and is metonymic in its nature.