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Chapter One Introduction

1.1 Research Background
When we talk about conversion, we mean a word, whose part of speech is changed fromone to another temporarily, while its form stays the same. For example, here is a sentencegoing like this,.“Wolf” is usually a noun standing for an aggressive and greedy animal. Anyhow here itshould be treated as a verb meaning “to eat like a wolf”. Such a phenomenon is calledNoun-Verb conversion. N-V conversion is also called zero-suffixation, N-V shift, etc. Thenoun from which the verb is converted is called “parent noun”, and the verb is usually termedas “denominal verb”. In all, N-V conversion is a process in which a noun is exploited as averb. The process contains two basic restrictions. Firstly, it is necessary for the parent noun tocarry a semantic element denoting action to be adopted as a verb. For example, milk the cow,air the room，soap-and-water one’s hands, etc. Secondly, the verb must be converted from itsparent noun without affixation. For example, powder the pills, elbow the way. In short, N-Vconversion means a linguistic phenomenon, in which nouns are converted into verbs directly,and “the meanings of ordinary denominal verbs clearly bear at least an appropriaterelationship to their parent nouns, from which they were historically derived” (Clark andClark: 769). In the article When Nouns Surface as Verbs, Clark & Clark give four principlesfor N-V conversion. Their effort makes N-V conversion manageable.
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1.2 Research Object
To cognitive linguists, linguistic structure and function are the results of human being’sexperience. Conception of the world motivated by human experience is the intermediacy oflanguage. N-V conversion reflects human’s way of thinking, and metaphor and metonymy areactively involved in human’s cognition and both have an impact on language. In this thesis,we attempt to probe into the phenomenon of the noun-to-verb conversion. It is a processwhere partially selected mappings occur across the domains or within one domain based onsimilarity, relativity and mental images. In essence, it is a process where cognitive and mentalcalculating operations actively take part. That is to say, it is a conceptual blending process.Conceptual blending theory proposed by Fauconnier & Turner (1995,1998,2002) is abackstage meaning construction mechanism which reveals the hidden cognitive process oflanguage phenomena. The conversion from nouns to verbs can be explained with thissemantic construction theory. The parent noun is the source cognitive domain, and theexperiential action domain is the target cognitive domain. In the process of N-V conversion,the position, function, appearance features and motor images are partially transmitted andblended into the action domain. In this way, the original semantic content of the former nounis extended and converted in some measure.
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Chapter Two Literature Review

2.1 Syntactic Approach
In the aspect of syntactic study, an influential hypothesis on verb derivation is LexicalArgument Structure (LAS). Hale＆Keyser (1993, 1997, 1998) set up their study on the basisof syntactic principles of head movement or incorporation.Lexical Argument Structure is defined in Reference to two possible relations between ahead and its arguments,本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。