The Cognitive Study Of English Denominal Verbs

Denominal verbs are the result of language creation. Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th edition) presents "denominal" as the meaning of "the word derived from noun". In the process of language creation, denominal verbs have experienced six stages from innovatives to well-established denominal verbs (Clark and Clark1979). Current researches focus on the analysis of partly previous examples, rather than a classified analysis of the new corpus. This thesis mainly focuses on the well-established denominal verbs. The option of the notion emphasizes on the relationship of parent nouns and denominal verbs based on the frame work of cognitive theories. Meanwhile, it is a data collection of denominal verbs of NEW SENIOR ENGLISH FOR CHINA STUDENTS’BOOKS (vols.1-8). In total,48examples we collected from these books were listed and explained in this thesis. Besides, we compared the examples from textbooks with the data from the Clark and Clark’s paper (1979). Furthermore, the data are clarified by Oxford English Dictionary (hereafter be shortened as OED) and Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th edition). At last, the data are built as a corpus available for senior high school students’learning and English teaching.Based on the previous studies, this thesis hypothesizes that ICM theory can give a convincing explanation of the cognitive construction of IDV: propositional models, image-schematic cognitive model, metonymic cognitive model and metaphoric cognitive model. According to the data collected, the first three models are fully demonstrated. Besides, the theory of basic-level category will be applied to interpret the body part words, which possess the characteristic of basic-level terms.The study will mainly tackle such questions as followed:(1) What is the relationship of a parent noun and a denominal verb based on the different categories?(2) How do the process of the understanding of the metal process of denominal verbs working in human’s mental world?(3) How does the ICM of denominal verbs construct? The major findings of the study include the following points:(1) The seven categories we presented fully employ the different relations such as:the agent-action relation, the location-action, the body part-action etc. with varied examples.(2) The basic-level category is the foundation of understanding of denominal verbs’ mental process. It starts from the knowing of human body, and then people’s cognition extends to perceive the outside world.(3) The different images of each example in the sentence construct an ICM of itself. The meaning of denominal verb is generated and constructed by the interaction among different models.The significance of this thesis is to build a corpus of denominal verbs for high school English books with a series of cognitive theories. The future study is hoped to explore deeper through comparative work. Chinese denominal verbs from Chinese textbook are required to be collected and compared with English. Furthermore, a comprehensive corpus of denominal verbs will be established for English teaching in the future study.