A Systemic Functional Approach Of Transitivity To Words Of Conversion

The conversion of words is an interesting linguistic phenomenon. The relevant researches concern not only lexicology (word formation method), semantics (semantic features), pragmatics (context of use), rhetoric (word polishing), stylistics (stylistic features), textual typology (distribution in different texts), but also cognitive science (word formation and recognition mechanism), translation studies (translation of words of conversion), lexicography (notation of word class) and contrastive linguistics (words of conversion in different languages).All kinds of experiences such as happening, action, perception, meaning, existence, and component are divided into various processes in Halliday's transitivity system. The relevant participants and circumstances are also specified in the process. Varied processes and participants combine to make different choices.From a systemic functional approach of transitivity, the thesis makes a statistical analysis of the phenomenon of conversion in the corpus of words of conversion, which is built based on Corpus of Modern Chinese, Peking University (http://ccl.pku.edu.cn:8080/ccl_corpus/index.jsp?dir=xiandai). The research expounds on the following three questions:(1) What is the main process in the N→V shift, the N→Adj. shift, the Adj.→V shift? (2) What is the main process in the literary discourse, the periodical discourse, the public discourse that includes the words of conversion? (3) What special functions do the processes that include the words of conversion have? The findings demonstrate that (1) the main process is the material process, the relational process, the material process respectively in the N→V shift, the N→Adj. shift and the Adj.→V shift; (2) the main process in the discourse is the material process, the relational process, the material process, respectively; (3) the processes that include the words of conversion have its certain functions, such as vivifying the description, conveying the thoughts and content and enriching the language.The research can provide theoretical interpretation for the diverse meanings and forms of words of conversion in different contexts; it also enables people to have a good command and comprehension over the words of conversion in actual language use.