The Cognitive Motivation Of English Word Conversion

Under the framework of cognitive linguistics, traditional grammatical classes are classified into two kinds—relationship and entity by Langcaker. The relationship category includes process relationship and non-processual relationship. Based on this core concept, the thesis, focusing on verbs, mainly studies the phenomenon of English word conversion and the cognitive principles and motivations during the evolutionary process, trying to reveal the cognitive motivations behind the seemingly straightforward word conversion.The thesis starts with randomly chosen 500 verbs from Oxford English Dictionary, the thesis counts the quantities of verbs evolving into other parts of speech; in the meanwhile, the converted sequence between various parts of speech and the possible evolution mechanism during the converting process are summarized. After accomplishing the collection and statistics of data, the thesis mainly focuses on explaining the cognitive principles of English word conversion from the perspective of prototype theory and cognitive motivation.The research questions are as follows:(1) Among the conversion between parts of speech of the collected verbs, which is the most typical conversion type?(2) Are there any dynamicity differences during the process of conversion?(3) How the motivational factors are presented in the conversion between nouns and verbs? And what are the promoted conditions and factors?The thesis draws the following conclusions: 64.4% of the conversion is centralized around verbs, and the converted essence is the conversion between entity and relationship; the more derivative words a verb has, the less typical a verb is; and the more prototypical a verb is, the more motivations it has. The research result shows that the essence of the superficial conversion is the conversion between process and relationship. The parts of speech of a word also have typical and atypical differences, which depends on the practical usage to see which is more salient.The thesis tries to verify the core idea of cognitive linguistics, that is the form components of language—pronunciation, vocabulary and grammar are in a natural continuum, the language process and relationship is the unified model that can be applied to explain all kinds of traditional parts of speech. On this basis, the thesis, depending on the conversion of verbs, re-examines the classification of formal grammar, finds the shortage behind the seemingly uniform standard and at the same time provides references for further verify the semantic evolution and grammaticalization process.