A Study Of English Verbal Nominalization Based On The Prominence View

As a common linguistic phenomenon in the English language, nominalization is also animportant grammatical phenomenon. By means of nominalization, the conception andmeaning of nouns can be expressed by other parts of word speech. The simplest definition ofnominalization refers to the production of nouns based on other word classes. On account ofthis point, nominalization is just a kind of conversion between nouns and other word classes,which has been the interesting topic of linguistic researchers.Early in Ancient Greece Period, Plato and Aristotle discussed conversion betweennominal compositions and predicate ones. With the deepening of scholars’ research, most ofthe attention was fixed on the nominalization field. Many linguists both at home and abroadhave described, researched and discussed this linguistic phenomenon. Jespersen originallystudied nominalization under the framework of grammatical study, analyzing Englishnominalization and a series of problems involved. Taking Bloomfield as a representative,Descriptive Structuralists classify nominalization according to Immediate ComponentAnalysis. However, they did not put forward the definition of nominalization.Transformational Generative linguists take the process of nominalization as the result ofsyntactic structural changes, considering that nominalization is generated by a set of fixedrules. Systemic Functional Linguistics, under the leadership of Halliday, holds thatnominalization is a kind of grammatical metaphor, offering a more systematical study ofnominalization. In the1980s, as cognitive linguistics came into being, a new perspective foranalyzing nominalization is afforded.This thesis aims to give a cognitive explanation for nominalization by employing somebasic views of cognitive linguistics. Nominalization, as a linguistic phenomenon as well as acognitive psychological phenomenon, must have an underlying internal motivation based onthe background of human’s cognitive psychology. Taking the Prominence View in cognitivelinguistics as the theoretical framework, this study tends to verbal nominalization, in order toseek out the backstage cognitive and internal rules during the process of verbal nominalization. It is beneficial for people to know the nature of verbal nominalization andalso master the specific application of this linguistic phenomenon in language use.This thesis consists of five chapters. The first chapter is the introduction part, mainlyfocusing on the research background, aim, methodology and the significance as well. Thesecond chapter chiefly reviews different studies of nominalization based on differentlinguistic approaches. The third chapter is the theoretical part of this thesis, giving a detailedintroduction to the Prominence View. The forth chapter is the main body part of this thesis, inwhich the process of verbal nominalization is discussed in detail. The process can be dividedinto two stages. The first stage is that some knowledge concerning concepts in the cognitivedomain of a verb is profiled on account of their prominence. The second stage is that theprofiled concepts are activated in their corresponding nominal cognitive domain, with theirnominal attributes being profiled and the process of nominalization is accomplished. The fifthchapter is the conclusion part.