ゲンダイ エイゴ ノ ゴ ケイセイ カラ ミタ Academic Word List ノ イミロンテキ コウサツ : メイシ ドウシ ケイヨウシカン ノ テンカン ジショウ オ チュウシン ニ

This article deals with a type of English word formation called conversion or“ zero-affixation” as in the creation of the verb text from the noun text or of the noun derivative(s) from the adjective derivative. This means the change of “parts of speech,” which leads to the shift of function in sentences. These phenomena can be widely observed in English as well as in other languages, which is an occurrence closely related with the economy of language expression. The purpose of this paper is to examine the conversion phenomena observed between English nouns, verbs and adjectives in terms of lexical semantics and to obtain some hints about general academic education. In this research we mainly use the Academic Word List (Coxhead, 2000) and the British National Corpus. In the conversion of the three parts of speech, the most prototypical conversion turns out to be found in that between nouns and verbs. The conversion between nouns and adjectives and that between verbs and adjectives might seem less salient than that between nouns and verbs. In order to effectively use the English vocabulary for general academic purposes, we need to develop a deeper insight into the conversion phenomena as well as other word formation processes such as prefixation, suffixation, and compounding