A Cognitive Analysis Of Noun-verb Conversions In Modern English And Chinese Languages

Conversion refers to the phenomenon that a word of a certain word class is converted into a word of another word class directly without the addition of an affix. As a special language use, conversion has attracted much attention from linguistic scholars domestic and abroad. As the most frequent conversion phenomenon, noun verb conversion exists in modern English and Chinese widely. Noun verb conversion is a kind of unusual phenomenon in language. How to treat this kind of non-conventional linguistic phenomenon and the analysis of its cause of formation plays an important part in the development of noun verb conversion, the creative use of language and in the appreciation of the language creativity. Therefore, the study of it is of great value.According to the definition of conversion, the so-called noun verb conversion refers to the way of using a noun as a verb directly without changing the noun form in certain contexts to achieve the syntactic features of the verb with the corresponding meaning of action. This phenomenon is very popular in English and ancient Chinese, and it also has an increasing trend in contemporary Chinese. Noun verb conversion reflects economical principle of language and can produce strong pragmatic effect, thus it is of great value to study.From the perspective of cognitive semantics, this thesis discusses the semantic expression and the comprehension of noun verb conversions. This thesis holds that the connotation of the parent noun is the semantic foundation of noun verb conversion, and the inherent typical characteristic (or prototypical meanings) of the parent noun is the motivation of the semantic derivatives of noun verb conversion. This thesis also maintains that the semantic derivative of noun verb conversion is achieved through metaphor and extension. Through metaphor the conversion realizes the shift from literal meaning to metaphorical meaning; and through extended meaning, it realizes the shift from the primary meaning to the description meaning. As for the cause of noun verb conversion, this thesis finds that language factors and psychological factors are involved. As far as vocabulary is concerned, the small number of vocabulary is the direct reason of forming noun verb conversion. The pursuit of simplicity and the pursuit of novelty are psychological factors of forming noun verb conversion.Besides, this thesis evaluates the phenomenon of noun verb conversion and makes a summary of the advantages of noun verb conversion, and pinpoints its deficiencies. At last this thesis illustrates the implications of noun verb conversion for vocabulary teaching, compiling dictionaries and translation.