A Cognitive Study Of Conversion Of English Adjectives

Conversion is a process whereby a word of a certain word-class is shifted into a word of another word-class without the addition of an affix. In English, conversion is a significant way of word formation. While conversion is usually viewed as a rhetorical device in Chinese. And conversion is different with the following two terms: flexible use of parts of speech and fission of word class. As a language phenomenon, conversion is the reflection of people’s cognition.In the field of language study, conversion has always been a hot topic. Previous researches mostly discuss conversion from the perspective of language, especially the conversion between nouns and verbs. This thesis adopts the decategorization, conceptual metonymy and metaphor theory to analyze the conversion of English adjectives.This thesis points out that the development of decategorization is root in prototype effects. Thanks to the unclear boundaries and unequal status of members in a category, the appearance of the unstable and intermediate state of the members comes into being. It will be impossible of decategorization to the develop. Decategorization is one of the most important cognitive ability of human beings and the significant mode of language and cognition innovation. On the level of linguistic study, decategorization refers to a process during which a member of a category loses some original categorical features and obtains new categorical features.Traditionally, metonymy is viewed as a process of substituting one linguistic expression for another, or a relation in which one linguistic expression “stands for” another. The cognitive view holds that as a basic mode of thinking, metonymy is conceptual in nature and should be defined as a cognitive process in which one conceptual entity, the vehicle, provides mental access to another conceptual entity, the target, within the same idealized cognitive model. Traditionally, metaphor is viewed as a rhetoric device, while in cognitive linguistics, metaphor is conceptual in nature and should be defined as a cognitive process in which one conceptual entity, the vehicle, provides mental access to another conceptual entity, the target, in two different domains. In this study, conceptual metonymy and metaphor are operation mechanisms of conversion of English adjectives.This thesis mainly analyzes two kinds of conversions. Therefore, the main points of the study can be divided into two parts. The first part is description and discussion of conversion of English adjectives at semantic level. In this part, we mainly discuss two types of conversions: Adjective-Noun conversion and Adjective-Verb conversion. The focus of this part is how conceptual metonymy and metaphor be realized in the process of conversion. The second part following is to discuss the grammatical shift of conversion. We mainly focus on the grammatical shift of English adjectives in some grammatical structures, such as adjectives convert into nouns, adjective as predicate and so on. On one hand, they add some of the distributional features syntactically which display as the followings: they can be modified by quantifier and demonstrative pronouns. Moreover, their premodification will not be restricted rigidly. On the other hand, adjectives can refer to the specific entities, and they have referential function. They transfer to express more concrete and more detail meaning from modifying things. Adjectives’ modificatory function switches to referential function.By researching the conversion of English adjectives, we conclude that decategorization can not only explain how conversion of adjectives happens but also how it is displayed at semantic and grammatical levels from the perspective of cognitive linguistics. Additionally, as operation mechanisms, conceptual metonymy and metaphor play a rather important role in the understanding of the process of conversion. Therefore, this thesis may give some help to English learners and researches for a better understanding of cognitive mechanism of English language in language use.