A Cognitive Study Of Adjectival Nominalization In English

Adjectives as an indispensable part of speech in English are an important topic of study in English grammar and have attracted the attention of linguists’ both at home and abroad.Typical syntactic functions of adjectives are noun modifiers,subject complements and object complements.However,in practical language use,some adjectives display some or all characteristics of nouns,and they can be used to refer to people or things,acting as subjects,objects and complements.This phenomenon is called adjectival nominalization in linguistics.Although a lot of research has been done on the nominalization of adjectives in English,there are still problems that have not been solved satisfactorily:there is still controversy about the classification of adjectival nominalization,and there is no systematic study on the licensing conditions,cognitive motivations and mechanisms of adjectival nominalization.This thesis has made a comparatively systematic study on these problems by employing the prominence principle,the economic principle and the conceptual metonymy theory in cognitive linguistics.The thesis has first reclassified and systematically described the nominalization of adjectives in English,finding that,according to the typicality and completeness of noun characteristics possessed bynominalized adjectives,adjectival nominalization can be divided into typical adjectival nominalization and nontypical adjectival nominalization,with the former resulting in typical nominalized adjectives and the latter nontypical nominalized adjectives.These two types of nominalized adjectives have different semantic and syntactic features.Semantically,typical nominalized adjectives are prominent in number concept,having dual number concept and single number concept,while nontypical nominalized adjectives are prominent in reference meaning,most of them expressing generic meaning and some expressing specific meaning under the influence of determiners and contexts.Syntactically,typical nominalized adjectives have all the syntactic features of nouns,while nontypical nominalized adjectives have only some syntactic features of nouns.After the reclassification and description,the thesis has explored the licensing conditions for adjectival nominalization in English and found that permanent attribute and gestalt feature are the licensing conditions.The former means that only adjectives referring to permanent attributes of things can be nominalized,and the latter means that only adjectives referring to things with perceptible gestalts can be nominalized.These two licensing conditions work together.Adjectives can be nominalized and,as a result,serve as noun-phrase heads only when they satisfy the two licensing conditions at the same time.Finally,the thesis has analyzed the cognitive motivations and the cognitive mechanisms of adjectival nominalization in English.The results show that the cognitive motivations of adjectival nominalization are profiling the attributes designated by adjectives and pursuing linguistic economy and that the cognitive mechanism involved in adjectival nominalization is metonymy,the metonymic mechanism being to use the attributes of things to stand for the things themselves,which is specifically embodied in mechanisms of PROPERTY FOR CATEGORY,NATIONALITY FOR CITIZENS and STATE FOR AGENT/PATIENT.The study of this thesis has expanded the application scope of the prominence principle,the economic principle and the conceptual metonymy theory.The findings of this study can deepen English learners’ understanding of adjectival nominalization,and be of some referential value to English learners in distinguishing and using different types of nominalized adjectives.