A Cognitive Approach To English N-N Compounds

In contemporary English, compounds account for a large proportion in itsvocabulary. An N-N compound refers to a compound noun which is composed by twoor more nouns. In this thesis, the author only study N-N compounds which iscomposed of two nouns with the pattern of N-Nâ†'N. The previous studies mainlyexamine the internal syntactic relations, the generative mechanisms within EnglishN-N compounds on the ground of the Componential Analysis Theory and theGenerative Theory. Little attention has been paid to the issue of the internal complexsemantic relations of English N-N compounds from the cognitive perspective. Thisthesis aims to study the internal semantic relations of N-N compounds withConceptual metaphor and conceptual metonymy.The corpus in this study mainly comes from the Oxford Advanced Learner’sEnglish-Chinese Dictionary (the7th Edition), partly from the other academic works ofN-N compounds. Through the analysis of these corpuses, this thesis comes to thefollowing conclusions: Firstly, metaphor-based N-N compounds are more frequentthan metonymy-based ones. Secondly, in metonymy-based N-N compounds, PARTFOR WHOLE, PRODUCT FOR ACTION, METERIAL FOR OBJECTIN is the mostfrequently used. Thirdly, the semantic meaning constructions of N-N compounds takethe nouns as reference points to activate the related encyclopedic knowledge andestablish the semantic relations. N-N compound research has both theoreticalsignificance and practical significance.