English Denominal Verbs:An Interpretation From Cognitive Grammar Perspective

Denominalization is a derivational process whereby a noun is converted into a verb without an affix. As human’s creative use of language, it brings forth denominal verbs. A lot has been achieved by scholars home and abroad in interpreting denominal verbs syntactically, semantically, morphologically and pragmatically. With the development of cognitive linguistics especially cognitive grammar, denominal verbs get to be analyzed in a new way. How denominal verbs are made possible? How to explain denominal verbs from the perspective of cognitive grammar? The present thesis is an attempt to answer these questions.The previous studies have explanatory limitations. Semantic properties are ignored in syntactic study. Internal construction of words is not given due attention in semantic study. Generative process of denominal verbs is not dealt with in pragmatic study. Meaning construction does not get adequate interpretation in morphological study. Quite different from traditional grammar, cognitive grammar does not make a clear-cut distinction between syntax and semantics. The significance of this new perspective lies in that meaning is described with reference to cognitive processing, and fundamental syntactic categories have an essentially semantic basis. Noun to verb shift as a process is also fully interpreted.Since the meaning of a linguistic expression consists of both conceptual content and a particular way of construing (or viewing) that content, great importance is attached to semantic construal, in which prominence and visual scanning (an essential part of perspective) are most relevant to the analysis of denominal verbs. The grammatical category of an expression is determined by its profile. Nouns denote things and thingness is profiled, while verbs denote actions and process gets profiled. Thus denominal verbs can be analyzed as a shift of attention from denoting the thingness to the process.Metonymy is our ability to make use of one conceptualized entity as a reference point of access to another entity, and it is central and essential to grammar. Grammatical metonymy is within the range of cognitive grammar. Double metonymy is proposed on the basis of reference-point relationship and profile/active zone discrepancy. Target-in-source metonymy corresponds to domain reduction and source-in-target metonymy corresponds to domain expansion. After domain reduction and domain expansion successively or domain expansion only, nouns, which are the participants of an action, activate the whole process of the action. In this way denominal verbs are made possible.In the present thesis,630denominal verbs are collected from the8th edition of Oxford Advanced Learner s Dictionary. These denominal verbs are categorized based on the roles of their parent nouns in the action schema. After the analysis of word classes in cognitive grammar model, dimensions of semantic construal and grammatical metonymy, the findings of the present thesis are summarized as follows: First, prominence has been used to explain denominalization. Denominal verbs and their parent nouns share the same base but differ in profiling. Base-Profile prominence and Trajector-Landmark prominence can be adopted to interpret denominal verbs. Second, grammatical metonymy has motivated denominalization. After going through target-in-source metonymy and source-in-target metonymy successively or source-in-target metonymy only, nouns are converted into verbs. Third, the change of visual scanning has resulted in denominalizaiton. We adopt summary scanning to nouns while our way of scanning changes into a sequential fashion, which leads to denominalization.