A Corpus-based Diachronic Study Of Body Terms Used As Denominal Verbs-A Cognitive Perspective

Denominal verbs refer to verbs that are derived from nouns without any affixes.They have gone through diachronic process in which cognitive abilities play fundamental roles.Many studies have been conducted before and they can be divided into two general perspectives.Studies from the traditional perspectives include the grammatical studies,the rhetorical effect analysis and the comparative studies between English and Chinese on a macro level.The pragmatic inference and cognitive studies can be classified as modern studies,as they take human cognitive factors into account.All these studies have got fruitful results.However there are still shortcomings for example the diachronic studies on denominal verbs are in the minority,and the modern research method is rarely applied.This article takes the English denominal verbs of body terms as the research object,and combines with modern corpora to give a detailed description of denominal verbs.Based on the metaphor and metonymy theories and historical dictionaries,it further explores the cognitive mechanism of denominal verbs,hoping to make up for the deficiencies of previous research.This study found that some body terms are used as denominal verbs as early as the language itself,some body nouns come to be used as denominal verbs much late,and some body nouns have not been denominalized yet.According to Corpus of Historical American English,the frequency of denominal verbs shows a phased change.In the first half of the 19 th century,the frequency is low.From the second half of the 19 th century to the middle of the 20 th century,it shows an increase in proportion to time.In the second half of the 20 th century,it fluctuates within a small range and shows a growing trend at the beginning of the 21 st century.Judging from the texts,there is a direct correlation between the historical background and language changes.Major social events and technological progress have played a certain role in language innovation.According to Corpus of Contemporary American English,the frequencies ofdenominal verbs in different genres are significantly different.The frequency in Fictions is the highest among the eight genres,and it is slightly higher than that in Newspapers.In Popular Magazines and Spoken the frequencies are a little lower than that in Newspapers.The frequencies in Blogs,Web pages and TV/movie subtitles are moderate,while in academic texts it is the lowest.It goes without saying that the application of denominal verbs is directly related to genres.The rigorous language of the academic articles restricts the use of denominal verbs.The language of the fictions which is simple and colloquial provides a good environment for language innovation.Through the diachronic analysis of denominal verbs,this thesis found both metaphor and metonymy work in the process of denominal verbs.They form two modes of action,which are metonymy cognitive mechanism and metonymy-metaphor cognitive mechanism.Metonymy participates in the process of conversion by highlighting the different aspects of the parent noun,such as its semantics of action or its function.In the process of conversion,the referential meaning of the parent noun is weakened while the descriptive meaning is highlighted.Metaphor plays a role in expanding the meanings of denominal verb,by cross-domain mapping,the denominal verb can further be used to describe abstract action.