A Contrastive Study On English And Mandarin Instrument Denominal Verbs

Denominal verbs are considered as conversion from nouns to verbs without any derivation.There is an essential conceptual relation between denominal verbs and their parent nouns.Eventive reading is produced when a noun is converted to a verb.And the conceptual structures of those denominal verbs can be presented by their event structures.In addition,the conceptual structures of denominal verbs are not language specific,which means by analyzing the conceptual structures,we can find out their realizations in different languages.The study focuses on the instrument denominal verbs in English and Mandarin Chinese and tries to find out the encoding difference between the two languages.Data of the study are from BNC,COCA,CCL,and DECPC.The research organized as follows: firstly,it finds that the classification of instrument verbs is problematic in present literature in that it generally classified the denominal verbs into instrument verbs without an analysis of their different conceptual structures and syntactic behaviors.Secondly,in view of the problems,the present study makes a reclassification of instrument verbs based on their conceptual structures.Thirdly,based on the reclassification,we delve further into a contrastive analysis of English and Mandarin encoding differences of the same conceptual semantic meanings of denominal verbs.The major findings are listed as below.Firstly,it proved that the modified classification of instrument verbs in the present study is feasible and effective to explain the different syntactic behaviors of those instrument verbs.Secondly,comparisons between English and Mandarin instrumental expressions show that there are significant differences in encoding the conceptual meaning shared by English denominal verbs and Mandarin ones.English verbs are more capable in encoding the conceptual information of denominal verbs while Mandarin relies more on disyllable verbs and compositional expressions.Thirdly,conceptual semantics guarantee the conceptual meanings of every semantic element(such as the Figure,the Ground,the Instrument,etc.)are presented in conceptual structures.It makes sure that all the conceptual information is encoded by verbs or compositional expressions,especially in E-C translations.The study reveals that conceptual semantics and lexicalization approach are more powerful to make a modified classification of instrument verbs,which is explanatory to the differences of their syntactic behaviors.Conceptual semantics offers a theoretical foundation to conduct a study on the differences between English denominal verbs and Mandarin ones.