A Functional Study of Lexical Conversion within Modern Chinese Nominal Group

Abstract

The phenomenon of lexical conversion within modern Chinese nominal group is often presented in ancient Chinese grammar. For many years, there have been earnest discussions in China about how we can better study the Chinese nominal group from alternative dimensions, e.g. cognition, pragmatics, multi-category words, word-class shift as well as functional perspective, but few pay attention to the lexical conversion from perspective of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL). As the SFL itself is “a problem-oriented theory” (Huang, 2006), to apply this theory to explain some certain language phenomena merits serious consideration. This paper is based on the Cardiff Grammar, an important model of SFL and the purpose is to explore the semantic and syntactic function in lexical conversion within modern Chinese nominal group. Through the contrastive study in light of the Cardiff Grammar, the Chinese nominal group can be functionally used as a Main Verb, a Main Verb Extension (MEx) and a prepositional group (pgp).