The present thesis attempts to analyze the cognitive mechanism or cognitive motivation of noun-verb conversion in English and Chinese on the basis of the conceptual metonymy theory.

This paper first attempts a hypothesis to the effect that the semantic content of a noun entails some semantic components denoting actions and that of a verb also entails some semantic components denoting things (the Hypothesis of Mutual Inclusion of Semantic Contents of Noun and Verb), and argues that the Hypothesis can be employed to account for the semantic motivation of the shift.

The paper discusses the definition and scope of the deverbal noun, and the present situation of its studies.

The paper also does some comparative studies of the deverbal noun and the denominal verb.

The paper narrows the scope of the study of the denominal verb, analyzes the problems in its research, and explores the causes for the deviation and its feasibility from the perspective of stylistics.

The present study, based on two different theoretical frames of verb-centered view and construction-centered view, by absorbing the linguistic constraint of affordance, selects Chinese EFL learners as subjects and takes a cross-sectional approach to probe into the dynamic role of construction and affordance in the comprehension of English denominal verb sentence.