Part-of-speech changing stands for the process where adding markers to a word of one part of speech produces a linguistic form of another part of speech.There is much discussion on whether meaning-preserving changing exists.Beforehand,a widely known part-of-speech model and its summary theory is that of Croft's.On the basis of a two-dimensional space spanned by semantic classes and pragmatic functions,he studied a number of related phenomena.In analyzing real data,we point out that:(1)Croft made mistakes on deciding whether specific constructions are meaning-preserving or meaning-changing ones.Whereas there are indeed meaning-preserving processes in two nominalization and two adjectivization processes,there is no meaning-preserving verbalization.(2)The semantic class of meaning-preserving part-of-speech changing devices is indeed propositions.The main function of such structure is to express several propositions in one sentence and to convey information effciently.Thus,picking different propositions as the head of the sentence reveals different strategies of information packaging.(3)On the horizontal dimension given by Croft,reference and predication are in essence speech acts,realized by noun phrases and verb phrases rather than lexical nouns and verbs,whereas modification is a syntactic notion,which is inappropriate to be put by the side of the previous two.
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