A Corpus-based Study Of Chinese Noun-Verb Conversion

In most languages, nouns and verbs are the most significant word class, so the conversion between them is also the focus concerned by researchers all the time. In the case of Chinese, it’s relatively common in ancient Chinese for the phenomenon of nouns used as verbs directly without variation. In contemporary Chinese, it’s comparatively general for the phenomenon of nouns used as verbs. Hence, the study of noun-verb conversion is a very interesting language subject and can help us to get a better understanding of the nature of language creativity.Reviewing the previous research of denominal verbs, the author discovers that the structural, generative, cognitive and functional linguists have all described and interpreted the phenomenon of denominal verbs from different perspectives. Their efforts make a great contribution to comprehending such linguistic phenomenon better. However, the existing research on denominal verbs have some limitations, shown as below.1) It is restricted to analyzing and interpreting the individual and typical sentences of denominal verbs, as the cases of denominal verbs collected in Chinese are not enough. There is no systematic research or no overview displayed on denominal verbs in Chinese.2) Most studies study noun-verb conversion in isolated words or sentences, ignoring the levels of phrases and discourses, and frequency distribution of denominal verbs in different texts as well.3) The theory adopted in the research of denominal verbs in contemporary Chinese is mainly grammatical metaphor whereas there shall be some breakthrough for the mechanism and semantic comprehension of denominal verbs.In this research, the beneficial attempt will be done in the following areas to make up for the shortage of the former research. Generally, there are three objectives in this thesis.The first objective is data collection. Since this research is based on the Contemporary Chinese Dictionary (5th edition) and CCL (Center for Chinese Linguistic PKU), the prerequisite for doing so is to find out all the words that are experiencing the process of conversion from nouns to verbs. In order to fulfill this goal, first of all, all the words which are tagged as and only as nouns in the Contemporary Chinese Dictionary will be selected, then input these words separately into CCL to check whether there are examples in which the target words are used as verbs, if there are such examples, examples will be collected. By doing so, all the converted words from nouns to verbs will be collected, which can illustrate how many noun words at present in The Contemporary Chinese Dictionary are experiencing conversion to verbs, what are the genres in which conversion happen, and what are the specific sources in which converted word examples come from and so on. In a word, data collection will objectively illustrate all the verbs converted from nouns and make up for the description-inadequacy of the previous study.The second objective is data description. This thesis will try to give a relatively comprehensive description for the data from the aspects of qualitative and quantitative description, analyze the distribution, frequency and source information of the denominal verbs. By doing so, the converted words will be illustrated objectively to readers.The third objective is data explanation. In this thesis the author adopts the conceptual blending theory which reveals the mechanism of the noun-verb conversion and also the semantic comprehension of denominal verbs.This thesis has six chapters. In chapter one, the author introduces the related background for this study, elaborates the significance of study, sets research objectives, and illustrates the research methods. The second chapter is about the literature review which can show its readers the background or the related studies on Chinese noun-verb conversion. Chapter three is about the procedure of data collecting. Chapter four is mainly about the frequency of conversion in different genres. Chapter five is the discussion part; in this part the author adopts the conceptual blending theory to explain the Chinese noun-verb conversion. Chapter six is the conclusion part which analyzes the findings, and at the same time gives some suggestions for future studies.