Reinterpretation Of Least Effort Principle In N-V Shift

N-V shift has increasingly gained its popularity in modern English and is studied by many linguistic scholars. As a generally acknowledged principle to guide human beings' behaviors, Zipf's least effort principle bears its universal applicability to many anthroposociological phenomena. And it is more frequently referred to as a motivation of N-V shift. As a matter of fact, least effort principle needs to be illuminated from two aspects, the needs of speakers and the acceptance of listeners. This thesis further expounds the operation of N-V shift according to Laurence Horn's R-principle(relation principle) and Q-principle(quantity principle), which derives from the least effort principle and the former is speaker-based, the latter listener-based.Therefore, the research questions are:1) How do the speakers achieve the least effort in the N-V shift expression? 2) How do the listeners realize the least effort in the N-V shift interpretation?Comparison of N-V shift between English and Chinese in this thesis is conducted to verify the regulation of least effort principle. Also, Adj-V shift and Adv of place-V shift are gained a brief discussion to show people's efforts to produce economic language by the conversions into verbs. In addition, the writer's owe experiences of using N-V shift are highly thought of, which makes introspective study another main method for this thesis. And a questionnaire is also carried out to further investigate the actual usage of N-V shift and to verify the researches of N-V shift in this thesis.With the rapid development of cognitive linguistics and cognitive pragmatics, metaphor and metonymy arise as powerful cognitive mechanisms, which can be applied to explain the process of the production and understanding of the meaning of N-V shift. N-V shift sentence is lexicogrammatically grammatical metaphor, which is different from congruent expression for its conciseness and novelty, and it could save the speaker's effort. Human beings' capabilities of conceptualization and categorization make the language knowledge stored in the mind in the forms of image schemata, which benefits the reorganization of concepts by changing cognitive profiles. Metonymic thinking makes it possible for listeners to grasp quickly the meanings of denominal verbs through semantic spreading activation model, which lays much stress on the semantic similarity.The major research findings in this thesis are:1) The speakers' least effort governed by the R-principle is achieved through the metaphorical grammar in the lexicogrammatical level; 2) The listeners' least effort ruled by Q-principle is realized with the aid of metonymic thinking.The foregrounding effect of denominal verb catches the listeners' attention, however, with the widespread use of N-V shift, such metaphorical expression may undergo de-metaphoricalization, i.e. the denominal verb would be recorded in dictionary as an alternative meaning of the parent noun and replaced by other grammatical metaphors. Therefore, N-V shift expression should be a two-way dynamic good balance, taking both the speakers' needs of communication and the listeners' degree of acceptance into consideration, and N-V shift is not necessarily saving efforts for both parts.