Corpus-Based Study Of Part Of Body Terms Used As Denominal Verbs---Analysis From Cognitive Metonymy Perspective

Part of body terms usually belong to basic-level terms which are active in word formation and apt to form a large number of metaphorical or metonymic expressions. Cognitive linguistics believe that Human beings understand or measure unknown objects according to the familiar ones. According to these cognitive maxims, it is not difficult to understand why human beings take the human body as the prototype in cognizing the world.This thesis aims to analyze collocates, from a metonymy perspective of the selected part of body terms as well as register distribution, semantic prosody if there is and development track with the help of COCA and COHA to find out how part of body terms are used as denominal verbs and what cognitive mechanism are applied in such uses, therefore. To some extend, this research is an interdisciplinary study. Metonymy can be demonstrated as the formula’B’for ’A’,where’B’is the vehicle and’A’is the target which is applied as the main theoretical support in the study. Through the analyses of part of body terms,, the author finds that these terms function as the vehicles, and through the access, those vehicles can reach the targets, while these targets refer to function and in a few cases location of the part of body terms. Besides, it is clear that the use of part of body terms as denominal verbs presents a remarkable growing trend since the early nineteenth century. The trend thus indicates that human beings are getting inclined to use denominal verbs. To check that the conclusion is not exclusive to part of body terms used as denominal verbs, the author randomly selects some other words characterizing as different word class and different conversions.The result proves that there is also a growing trend of frequency in the past thirty years. The fact testifies that cognitive influence has been magnified. A questionnaire which aims to test foreign language learners’grasp of the word used in different part of speech demonstrates that they have problems in this regard. The significance of this study remains that it explains the working mechanism of part of body terms as denominal verbs, bringing reference to the study of other word conversions. The extended analysis has some pedagogic implications as well.