A Constructional Grammar Approach To English Denominal Verbs

Along with the rapid progress of time and society, the continuous development of people’s cognitive abilities has been improved greatly and language applications have also rapidly developed. A large number of fresh and peculiar expressions has come into view. There are many linguistic experts and scholars of different subjects who have made in-depth studies on the nature of language and interesting phenomena of all kinds.Forms of language are always in a flexible change and the expressions of people keep up with time. Since denominal verbs make language vivid, lively, and give us a creative and highly expressive language phenomenon, they become more and more popular among native speakers. The meanings of denominal verbs are often more abundant than lexical explanations for they enrich the meanings of the state, action, intention, and methods that are derived from parent nouns and they give new meanings to the denominal verbs so that people give the most vivid descriptions of things, reflecting that language users have a strong sense of innovation and flexibility in the process of initiative language use, and also a kind of ability to accept change from the psychological perspective. English denominal verbs, which are powerful in expression, are welcomed by native speakers in newspapers, magazines, literary fictions, as well as daily communications. However, it is a little difficult for those learners who take English as the second or foreign language to accept this phenomenon and use it. The reason is, first of all, due to the learners’ lack of understanding of denominal verbs and lack of knowledge of the nature of this phenomenon so that a great many learners would feel it difficult to tend to this usage when starting from the initial study. Besides, compared with native speakers, Chinese English learners have less contact with English original materials so it’s difficult for them to deepen the understanding of denominal verbs. Chinese English learners are often influenced by traditional thinking habit and get used to producing English sentences according to Chinese grammatical rules, thus in most cases leaving it impossible to be comparable with the expression of the native speakers.For those various reasons, scholars of English linguistics both at home and abroad have studied denominal verbs from different aspects and made an in-depth exploration of research, to explore from perspectives of semantics, rhetoric, syntax, and pragmatics, which have made great achievements and greatly enriched theoretical knowledge of linguistics, as well as giving constructive guidance to English teaching and learning. With the development of linguistic theory, construction grammar as an emerging discipline has helped people get a totally new understanding of the language. However, studies of English denominal verbs, especially with the construction coercion in the framework of construction grammar are rarely seen.Therefore, this paper will try to analyze the forming process of denominal verbs from the perspective of coercion, including construction coercion, semantic coercion, lexical coercion and initial coercion combined with corpus (the Corpus of Contemporary American English) to explore section distributions of denomianl verbs used by native speakers and metonymy and metaphor behind denominal verbs. The thesis also tries to explain the forming reasons of the phenomenon from both theoretical and practical aspects so as to help Chinese English learners use the language innovatively on the basis of understanding, thus, enriching their language expression.