An Empirical Approach to the Track of English Noun-Verb Conversions

Conversion, as part of speech representation, is a special and common phenomenon in English. However, previous studies rarely touch on empirical researches on the track of lexical conversion. Therefore, this paper attempts to examine the most typical English noun-verb conversions via a survey of dictionaries and English corpora, finding that:1) from the perspective of authoritative English-American dictionaries, the noun-verb conversion occupies an absolute dominant position; 2) synchronically, different from the noun-verb distribution in the language system, converted verbs account for 10-16% more than the nouns, and the styles in which they appear seem to be the same; 3) diachronically, distinct from the noun-verb distribution trend in the system, the frequency of converted nouns has decreased while that of converted verbs increased in the past 200 years; 4) grammatically, all converted nouns are mostly singular while most converted verbs are in past and progressive tenses; 5) as for native speaking countries of English, the United States scores the largest number of converted verbs; 6) as to the acquisition, Chinese college students, especially those from 985 key universities, use far more converted nouns than verbs. The motivations for the above may lie in the noun-verb cornerstone and their inclusion. Such conversion indicates not only cross-category performance and transformation, but also strong expressivity and suitability for the change of styles or verbal variety. Moreover, it is economical and satisfies human cognitive profiles.