A Study Of Semantic Connection Of English“-(a)tion-typed” Deverbal Nominals Based On Thematic Roles And Syntactic Arguments

The relationship between nouns and verbs has always been a hot issue in the fieldof linguistics and computational linguistics. English is a language of morphologicchanges which usually indicate the part of speech and the use of a word. Most Englishdisyllabic and polysyllabic transitive verbs can be added suffixes like “-(a)tion” to formcorresponding deverbal nominals. This kind of words is characterized by the propertiesof both verbs and nouns. Morphologically speaking, they carry the features of nouns;semantically speaking, their senses can be divided into two types: concrete and abstract.The former is quite close to the sense of nouns, but the latter is closely associated withthat of verbs.This thesis, first of all, searches for deverbal nominals with such regularexpressions as*tion,*sion,*ment,*ance and*ure in Corpus of ContemporaryAmerican English, the final choice being a list of the first1,000words of highfrequency with the deletion of the ineligible words of the same suffixes. Then themeaning of deverbal nominals chosen is described from the perspectives of thematicroles and syntactic arguments. The abstract sense of such kind of words is quite close tothe meaning of their root verbs, which expresses an action or behavior. However, theconcrete sense of deverbal nominals can be explored from thematic roles and syntacticarguments activated by their root verbs.It is found that meanings of “-(a)tion-typed” deverbal nominals are closelyconnected with thematic roles activated by their root verbs. From the perspective ofsyntactic arguments, they connect their meaning with external argument and internalargument. External argument, the syntactic subject in a sentence, is the argumentbeyond the maximum projection of a verb. From the perspective of thematic roles, inmost cases, they connect their meaning with percept and agent. Internal argument, thesyntactic object or the nominal part of the syntactic adverbial of a sentence, is theargument within maximum projection of a verb. It can be further divided into directargument and indirect argument. A direct argument immediately follows a verb,deverbal nominals in most cases connecting their meaning with product, theme andpatient. However, an indirect argument normally immediately follows a preposition, itsmeaning being mostly connected with the roles of quantity, location and instrument. Inother words, the concrete sense of “-(a)tion-typed” deverbal nominals can be expressedby thematic roles and their hypernyms.In addition, this thesis, on the basis of a thorough description of deverbal nominals chosen, proposes a theoretical explanation of both the regular and irregular phenomenain their semantic connection. Or rather, regular phenomena can be explained from theperspective of syntax, but irregular phenomena are usually governed by other rules likehumans’ cognitive laws. Specifically, English deverbal nominals are most likely toconnect their meaning with the various thematic roles, with which their correspondingverb forms are associated. According to subject-object asymmetry in generativegrammar, the relationship between the object and the verb is closer than that betweenthe subject and the verb. Thus a conclusion can be drawn that the relationship betweenthe meaning of deverbal nominals and their internal arguments is much closer than thatbetween them and their external arguments. Besides, if the meaning expressed by thecombination of verbs and thematic roles they associated with is called event, differentverbs express different events. According to attentional view in cognitive linguistics,when humans observe different events, the extent of their concern about the eventparticipants is of difference. Such a cognitive law, while acting on language, leads to theresult that different semantic features are expressed even when the same suffix iscombined with different verbs.Finally comes a discussion of the research’s practical value based on theoreticalanalysis, i.e., its application in translation from English to Chinese. According to theresearch, in the translation of “-(a)tion-typed” deverbal nominals, collocative meaningand the comparison of English and Chinese should be taken into consideration.Collocative meaning analysis is the deduction of the concrete sense of deverbalnominals with the assistance of the words that coexist with them. As for the comparisonbetween English and Chinese, the following few differences are of great importance inthe translation of deverbal nominals. They include English noun preponderance vs.Chinese verb preponderance and impersonal in English vs. personal in Chinese.Therefore, in the translation of deverbal nominals from English into Chinese, feasibleare the following few choices: the transformation of English deverbal nominals intoverbs in Chinese, the transformation of “impersonal” in English into “personal” inChinese, and the addition of the logical subject. Such adjustments answer the purpose ofturning the abstract in English into the concrete in Chinese. It is hoped that the studyresults may have some benefits for Chinese EFL learners’ scientific prediction andaccurate understanding of deverbal nominals.