The Multicategorization Of "queer": A Corpus-based Study

The phenomenon that an English word without any obvious infections hasmore than one word classes in the language lexical level has been attracting theattentions of different schools’ linguists. The linguists have conducted substantialresearch from different theories and perspectives, and labeled the phenomenondifferent terminologies: zero-derivation, multiple class membership, function shift,conversion, de-categorization, etc. In essence, the above terminologies refer to thephenomenon that a word of single classes becomes a multi-category one over thediachronic change. Multicategorization refers to the process that a single categoryword becomes a multi-category one.By observing the corpora of queer from COHA and COCA, we find that theinitially adjective queer over100years diachronic change and on the influence ofmetaphor and metonymy, token frequency and type frequency, usage registers,becomes adjective queer, a verb queer and noun queer on the synchroniclanguage lexical level.This research deepens the understanding of multicategorization and dynamicfeature of word classes and has great implications for the lexicography in taggingthe word classes.