Authors: Anna Hutchinson, Sean Cameron
Mentors: Shupei Wang
Insitution: Brigham Young University
Our linguistic environment changes with every generation; out grows the old words our grandparents used to say, and in comes the new words the younger generations create. One such example of this concept of living words is Denominal Verbalization. It is defined as when the predicate of a sentence is a noun when it would normally be a verb, and is extremely common in English, so much so that the average English speaker might not even notice this, with examples such as “she cornered me in the library” and “you’re pressuring him too much.” This phenomenon can also be seen in both classical and modern Chinese. Denominal Verbalization showcases the creativity that humans have to take rigid grammar structures and dictionary definitions and flip them on their sides to create an updated meaning and usage of a word, in which speakers can still completely understand despite the lack of a formal explanation. In short, speakers of Chinese and English are able to just make up new meanings to words that almost anyone could understand. The human cognitive ability to effortlessly make sense of the world is astounding.
However, there can be some disparity between the levels of acceptance of these “new words” and how they’re used, namely across age, nationality/region, gender, and time spent on different social media platforms. Within the last couple of years, there has been a large increase in denominal verbalization across the internet in China and bleeding into Taiwan. A survey was created in order to test what kinds of nouns could become verbs and which ones were deemed unacceptable by the public. A total of 274 participants ranked a series of sentences on their level of acceptance from complete agreement that the sentence was grammatical to not understanding the sentence at all. This study dives into why the internet is such a great breeding ground for these “new online words," how these new meanings are created, and what types of demographics are the ones to accept and use these words the most. This research also gives rise to further questions such as the implications for second language learners of Chinese, the impact these words have on their ability to understand and use such words, as well as future studies on its pedagogical implications for L2 teaching/acquisition.