English Verbs Become Nouns [A Study on Nominalization of English Verbs Based on COCA Corpus]

Abstract: Verb nominalization is a lexical grammatical resource in English, which plays an important role in people's language activities. Traditional grammar studies often only focus on the syntactic constraints of nominalization, ignoring its deep cognitive structure analysis. In this paper, a new model, ECM+, is put forward by using COCA corpus, combining with the ECM (event domain cognitive model) of cognitive linguistics and the principle of graphic background, in order to explain the deep mechanism of nominalization of English verbs-the more formal the style, the higher the nominalization degree.

Keywords: nominalization of verbs; ECM graphic background theory; ECM+

Nominalization of verbs is conceptualization of actions. It can be considered that the nominalization process of verbs is a process in which their actions gradually change from static to dynamic and abstract concepts, and even become people or things related to actions. Nominalization provides the possibility for the speaker to omit the agent, so that the speaker can introduce the details in the background. Traditional grammar regards nominalization as a process of language formalization or grammaticalization, and often only pays attention to the syntactic constraints of nominalization, ignoring its deep cognitive structure analysis. Based on the COCA corpus, this paper analyzes the distribution of the nominalization structure of the word "visit" in different types of discourse, and makes a theoretical analysis of the data results from the cognitive perspective by using the relevant theory ECM+, aiming at explaining the essence of verb nominalization-the more formal the style, the higher the nominalization degree.

1. Related research background of verb nominalization

A study of nominalization of verbs by linguists

Linguistics defines and classifies nominalization from different theories. The school of transformational generative linguistics believes that "the process of nominalization is a process of psychological change. Through a series of psychological operations, the deep structure is transformed into the surface structure, which not only expresses the meaning of the deep structure, but also makes the structure more concise." Each nominalization corresponds to a deep sentence according to a certain law, and they try to provide a conversion formula between sentences and noun components. According to the school of functional linguistics, nominalization is an evolutionary process from truly expressing the objective world to tortuous reflecting the objective reality. The superficial meaning and deep meaning of discourse become inconsistent, which leads to the tension between different language levels, thus leading to the emergence of grammatical metaphor. According to the school of cognitive linguistics, nominalization is a transformation from psychological process scanning to holistic scanning, and the economic principle works together with the clarity principle and similarity principle of graphic background theory, which leads to the change of cognitive perspective and the cognitive prominence of communicative intention. Nine critics believe that the ideology implied by nominalization has the trend of "positive self-representation" and "negative others' representation".

Verb nominalization can be divided into two categories. One is conversion, that is, verbs are directly converted into nouns. For example, the enemy attack on this city shocked the world. One is derived, that is, nouns with derived suffixes (such as -ee, -er, -tion, -sion, -ment, etc. For example, correcting the composition takes up a large part of the teacher's time.

2. The relationship between verb nominalization and style-taking "visit" as an example

The choice of nominalization is closely related to style. Halliday (1985: 9 1) thinks that written language tends to be nominalized because it takes real-world experiences and phenomena as objects, so it uses nouns. In informal style, especially oral style, the speaker is talking when stating experiences and phenomena, telling what happened or did in words and describing experiences and phenomena as actions, so verbs are often used. Nominalization can make sentences more concise. Unsworth (2002) thinks that the advantage of English noun phrases that focus on events rather than processes (verbs) is that noun phrases can be modified by more resources than verb phrases, so they contain more information. Take the verb visit as an example. Based on the COCA database, we search the visited verb forms in 1) spoken language 2) novels 3) newspapers 5) academic articles, and get the data of their distribution frequency. Then put all kinds of noun forms of visits in the above five styles to get relevant data. The following table is 1 (data from the COCA corpus):

Visiting her leisure home in North Carolina always includes eating chicken. This is a sentence in an American newspaper. Many articles in newspapers and periodicals belong to official texts, verbs are often used as nouns, static verbs are used more, action verbs are used less, and sentences are long and complicated. As can be seen from the example 1, the author mainly wants to describe the journey to the protagonist's husband's house, so he doesn't spend much time describing the sender of the action.

Example 2. "Do you want to climb the Canterbury Valley? Isn't it enough to visit? " This is a sentence from an American novel. As we all know, the novel pays attention to the scene, and it is verbs that can express all the actions in the scene.

As can be seen from the above analysis, the more formal the style, the higher the nominalization degree.

3. The explanatory power of -ECM+ to verb nominalization from the cognitive perspective

3. The explanatory power of1ECM on verb nominalization

Cognitive linguists have constructed many models to explain the formation and syntactic structure of conceptual frameworks. For example, Langaker's pinball model and stage model, Talmi's power dynamic model, Leikauf's dynamic image schema, computer scientists Shank and Abelson's "script theory", Pant and Thornberry analyze dynamic events from the perspective of speech acts. However, these models have some problems more or less, such as the inability to explain static and dynamic events with one theory. Based on this, Professor Wang Yin put forward the event domain cognitive model theory.

ECM basically includes the main viewpoints discussed by the above scholars and some viewpoints of Lokoff. It can also be used to explain the formation of conceptual structure and the basis of syntactic structure. On the basis of linear analysis, it also highlights the hierarchy of the internal elements of the event, and because the action of ECM contains the concepts of dynamic and static, it unifies the various elements contained in the event. For example, 1: Visiting her leisure home in North Carolina always includes a trip to eat chicken.

From ECM, we can know that an event is composed of event body and action. Event body includes all kinds of nouns of the action sender, while action includes adjectives, adverbs, verbs and other words. Therefore, when expounding a thing, we can extract some elements according to the development order of things and the needs of narration. We know that the completion of a thing needs a series of actions and combinations of things, and the event of "visit" contains many factors, first of all, the sender of the action, and then the receiver of the action, including the preparatory work before the "visit", the things encountered on the way to the "visit" and so on. As can be seen from the example 1, the author thinks it is not necessary to show the agent and his actions, but mainly wants to explain the event of "visiting", so he uses the noun form of verbs. From the last section, we know that the noun form of verbs mostly appears in newspapers and academic articles, while the verb form mostly appears in novels and spoken English. As we know, newspapers, magazines and academic articles are mostly stating a fact or expressing a phenomenon, so nouns should be used. Using ECM can explain this phenomenon more reasonably from the cognitive point of view. But ECM can't highlight elements.

3.2 The explanatory power of graphic background theory

Talmi was the first person to apply the figure-ground theory to language research. He believes that the principle of figure-background separation is a basic cognitive principle of language organization information. He defined a graph as a conceptually movable object, whose path, position or direction are regarded as variables, and its special value is relative value. His definition of background is that the background is a static reference object relative to a frame of reference, and the path, position or direction of the figure is static relative to the background. 10 Generally speaking, people can neither see the figure nor the background. Graphics is a component contained in the background but protruding from it, which is dominant in cognition, the most obvious component and the focus of attention. It is usually a thing with complete shape, small volume, movable, simple and compact structure, more accessible, first seen and more patient. Compared with graphics, the background is not dominant in the crowd and has a low degree of prominence, which can be used as a cognitive reference point; It has some known features that can be used to describe graphics. It is a large, static, relatively complex, independent and more predictable object. If the balloon is above the house, it is often regarded as a figure with the house as the background; Another example is that the house is on the lawn, so the house is often regarded as a graph with the lawn as the background. ECM in cognitive linguistics can be used to unify all the elements in an event, and then highlight the required elements through the principle of background graphics. As shown in example 1, according to ECM, we can know that the events of "visit" include: action sender, vehicle, visiting mood, visiting process and so on. The principle of graphic background regards one factor in "access to this event" as a graphic and all other factors as a background.

3.3 the explanatory power of ECM+to verb nominalization

ECM+ refers to the integration of ECM and background graphics. It first extracts the characteristics of each element in the event, and then highlights the required elements according to the cognitive and combination styles. With regard to the nominalization of verbs, we can draw a conclusion from the distribution of the two parts of speech of the word "visit" in different styles: the more formal the style, the higher the nominalization of verbs. For example:

Visiting her leisure home in North Carolina always includes eating chicken.

Example 2: "You want to climb the Canterbury Valley? Isn't it enough to visit? "

The word "visit" has many forms, such as verbs visited, visited, visiting, nouns visited, visiting and so on. And nouns also indicate that subordinates who have visited this event can distinguish different characteristics, such as happy mood when they visit, red clothes they wear when they visit, and so on. Generally speaking, newspapers, magazines or academic articles all state facts or phenomena, or analyze phenomena before drawing conclusions. In other words, their cognitive perspective is from the event itself and the whole event, and the most commonly used method to explain this phenomenon is verb nominalization. According to ECM+, an event can be divided into many elements and many features can be obtained. Then, according to the style of the article, one of the features can be regarded as a figure and the rest as a background. In the example 1, because it is a newspaper and magazine article, the whole event of "visiting" is highlighted as a graph. In Example 2, due to the story-telling characteristics of the novel itself, verbs are emphasized in narration, so the action of "visiting" is highlighted as a graphic.

4. Conclusion

Nominalization plays an important role in people's language activities. The above discussion shows that the variation of style is closely related to the distribution of nominalized structures. Verb nominalization is used more in newspapers and academic articles. At the same time, the use of ECM+ can fully explain the differences of English verb nominalization in language form and syntax. Therefore, the distribution of verb nominalization structure in different styles helps us to understand the stylistic characteristics of various styles and is a form of understanding their formality.

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About the author: Chen Xue (1987-), female, from Chengdu, Sichuan, holds a master's degree in English language theory and application in graduate department, Sichuan International Studies University, majoring in cognitive linguistics.