A Cognitive Approach To English Verbal Nominalization

English nominalization is a common but interesting linguistic phenomenon,especially English verbal nominalization.Each school of linguistics has given different explanations towards English nominalization.Structuralists simply view nominalized structures as one of the form classes which are the same as nouns to realize certain syntactic function,ignoring the particularity of nominalization in grammar,semantics as well as pragmatics.Transformational-generative grammar only analyzes the forms of grammatical structures of those d nominals,ignoring the syntactic changes of those cognate words and the correlations between those cognate words and the contexts.Systemic-functional linguistics has a rather sound study on English nominalization,and it combines nominalization with grammatical metaphor from the perspective of the context and communicative function.However,all these studies mainly pay attention to grammatical features of nominalization,so few of them consider why people can conceive this kind of language phenomenon and how people conceive the semantic meanings.Cognitive linguists try to explain this from this perspective and focus on the intrinsic semantic changes between verbs and nouns.Most of the relating theses mainly use prototype theory,ICM theory,iconicity or the degrees of nominalization to illustrate English nominalization.In order to find a new way to illustrate the verbal nominalization in English,this paper studies the way how a parent verb transfers into different derived nominals and the differences between different nominalized forms from the perspective of cognitive grammar and illustrates the cognitive mechanism of nominalized forms.This paper mainly uses cognitive grammar as the guiding theory and chooses examples from Oxford Advanced Learner 's Dictionary(the Sixth Edition),analyzing verbal nominalization from cognitive approach with qualitative research method.To start with,this paper explains the cognitive basis of English verbal nominalization and the possibility of this transformation from the perspective of cognitive metaphors.Secondly,this paper vividly describes how a parent verb changes into several different cognate nouns with theories of profile and base as well as mental scanning process,combining with cognitive schema of verbs and nouns,to find out cognitive differences between verbal nouns with the form of-ing and those deverbal nouns which are derived from the same parent verb,which mainly includes different profiled parts and differences between non-transferred reference and transferred reference.Then,through the theory of boundedness and the differences between mass nouns and count nouns,this paper explains differences among different forms of nominals from the same parent verb.Lastly,the paper summarizes differences of those cognate nominals which are originated from the same parent verb and also illustrates their differences in practical uses.What can be found from the research is that the analysis of English verbal nominalization together with corpus can make semantic meanings and pragmatic functions into a coherent system.Furthermore,the analysis of mental mechanism of the process of verbal nominalization in English provides second language learners with a better understanding of a parent verb and its derived nominals,then they can use them more appropriately in their study.