English and Chinese have a certain degree of word order, which is the basis for us to compare English and Chinese word order. English and Chinese have similarities and differences in the order of noun modifiers. This can not only provide a legacy evidence for the study of human language typology, but also provide an understanding window for explaining human cognitive mechanism, especially human cognitive choice and its information processing ability and mechanism mapped in language.
Keywords: modifiers; Comparison; cultural difference
Abstract: English and Chinese have some similarities in word order, which is the basis for our comparison of word order between English and Chinese. There are similarities and differences between English and Chinese in the order of noun modification. This can not only provide evidence for the study of human language typology, but also provide a window for explaining the common cognitive mechanisms of human beings, especially the cognitive choices and priorities reflected in the language and information processing capabilities and mechanisms.
Keywords: modifiers; Comparison; cultural difference
Quoted paragraph
The contrastive study between English and Chinese is based on the commonness of human languages. Language * * * can be classified into two categories: one is universal in form, such as category characteristics, word order, interrogative form and negative form. One is universal, such as expressive function and textual function (Ding Jinguo, 1996). From the perspective of language morphology, language can be divided into analytical and comprehensive types. The main feature of analytical language is relatively fixed word order, while the main feature of comprehensive language is flexible word order. Chinese is an analytical language, and its word order is generally fixed without twists and turns. Its word combination depends on word order and function words. English is a language that focuses on synthesis and transits to analysis, and its word order is relatively fixed and flexible. Therefore, English and Chinese have a certain degree of * * * in word order, which is the basis for us to compare English and Chinese word order. This paper intends to make a comparative analysis of the word order of English and Chinese noun modifiers from two aspects: the preposition and postposition of English and Chinese noun modifiers and the sequencing analysis of multiple modifiers, so as to explore their similarities and differences and try to explore their causes from different angles.
1 pre-modifiers and post-modifiers.
Modifiers can be divided into pre-modifiers and post-modifiers according to their positional relationship with the head word. Pre-modifiers include all modifiers that appear before the head word; Post modifiers include all modifiers that appear after the head word. The position of English noun modifiers in phrases is flexible, while the position of Chinese noun modifiers is relatively fixed, which is a big difference between them.
1. 1 English noun modifiers have both pre-modifiers and post-modifiers, and they are unmarked. Prepositive modifiers are mainly used by pronouns, numerals, adjectives or adjective phrases, nouns or noun phrases, present participles or past participles; Post-modifiers are mainly composed of prepositional phrases, non-restrictive relative clauses, restrictive relative clauses, infinitives, present participle phrases, past participle phrases and longer adjective phrases. It is worth noting that in modern English, post modifiers tend to be pre-modifiers, that is, post modifiers are increasingly transformed into pre-modifiers. There are three main ways of this transformation: first, prepositional phrases as post modifiers are transformed into compound adjectives as pre modifiers; Secondly, attributive clauses are transformed into compound adjectives as pre-modifiers; Thirdly, the whole sentence is directly transformed into a compound adjective as a pre-modifier (Zhang Fake, 1996). In addition, English noun modifiers are separated from their head words, that is, separated modification. For example:
There are no accidents reported to us. Any accident report and its reviser are left to us separately. )
2) I must investigate this project as logically as possible. (Zhang Zhenbang, 1999). The investigation of this project I participated in and its revision should be separated as much as possible. )
1.2 Most scholars believe that Chinese noun modifiers are pre-modifiers. For example, Wang Kang and Xiao Yan (198 1) think that all the attributes in modern Chinese are placed before the modifier head. Shen Jiaxuan (1996) pointed out that Chinese always has modifiers before the head word. Wang Wuxing (2003) further pointed out that the position of attributes in Chinese is generally before nouns, even if several attributes are used together or long phrases are used as attributes, they should be put in front. Although this is a common view, the actual situation is not so simple. Chinese noun modifiers are mainly pre-modifiers and post-modifiers. Chinese attributives are generally placed before the head language. In literary works, the attributives of a few sentences are placed after the head language, or formed separately after the head language, which mostly belongs to an ectopic word order for rhetorical needs (Xiong Wenhua, 1996). For example:
3) (Snow) Draw flowers and trees in various formats on our glass, oblique, straight, curved and upside down (Snow in Yan Lu).
Another example is:
4) She (Sister Xianglin) holds a bamboo green in one hand and a broken bowl in her hand, which is empty; With one hand leaning on a bamboo pole longer than her, the lower end cracked (Lu Xun's Blessing).
Therefore, we think that noun modifiers in Chinese, like English, have both pre-modifiers and post-modifiers. The difference is that the post modifiers of Chinese nouns appear less and are marked.
1.3 The word order difference between English and Chinese noun modifiers may be caused by the cognitive differences between English and Chinese peoples. There is a correspondence between the conceptual structure formed by people's perception of the outside world and the language structure, or iconicity (Shen Jiaxuan 1996). The external space is three-dimensional and three-dimensional. People's sensory system faces a lot of information shocks, but people's attention is limited, so they are also selective. They always focus on the most prominent information and regard other information as secondary background information. When people perceive the spatial relationship between two objects, they always regard one object as the object of attention and the other as its reference. The object to be noted is called "map" and the reference object is called "ground". For a known scene, the determination of "target" and "background" can be freely chosen, and the key lies in which object to focus on. Because language is one-dimensional, there is a problem of reflecting the order of language expression when reflecting the three-dimensional external space. The target is the highlighted object, which becomes the focus information, but there are only two options for the position of the focus information: front or back, because there are only two ways for people to perceive space: from the target to the background or from the background to the target. These two ways of perception have applications in film and television production. Liu Ningsheng (1995) made an investigation on the stage background subtitles of Cao Yu's drama Peking Man. The results show that native speakers in China have a strong tendency to change from "background" to "goal" when they perceive spatial relations. Shen Jiahua (1996) investigated the scene description of Bernard Shaw's The Flower Girl, and found that English, like Chinese, has a strong perceptual tendency from "background" to "goal". Noun modifiers always take the head language as the "object" and the modifier as the "background", which is consistent in English and Chinese. According to the above, the noun modifiers in English and Chinese should be mainly prepositional modifiers, which is different from what we described before, but considering the increasingly obvious "post-modifier moving forward" in modern English, this conclusion is also reasonable.
Word order of more than two modifiers
Multiple modifiers are another attribute of English noun modifiers and Chinese noun modifiers. Polynomial modifiers can be divided into single-layer polynomials and multi-layer polynomials. One-level polynomial modifiers are composed of more than two modifiers belonging to the same logical category, and the relationship between each modifier is equal. For example, a bunch of red, white and yellow roses, and for example, in terms of length, width and height, each size also meets the design requirements. According to English habits, the word order of noun single-layer multiple modifiers is generally determined by the length of words and the order of the first letter in the alphabet. The word order of Chinese nouns with multiple modifiers is flexible, which is only restricted by semantic logic and expression habits (Xiong Wenhua, 1996). Multilayer and polynomial modifiers are composed of more than two modifiers belonging to different logical categories, and there is a complex relationship between them, which is the focus of our discussion and comparison.
2. 1 English nouns with multiple layers and modifiers
With various modifiers, the word order of English noun phrases is generally: determiner+descriptive adjective+category word+noun head word+prepositional phrase+relative clause. For example:
An interesting English story book was written by a famous China writer.
This arrangement of English noun phrase modifiers enables people to master English noun modifiers basically. However, when encountering some complex noun modifiers, conjunctions (and, but or or) sometimes appear between modifiers, and sometimes commas are used.
2.2 Chinese multi-level and multi-modifier nouns
The word order of Chinese noun modifiers is strict and regular. Many scholars try to describe this law of word order from different angles. Xiong Wenhua (1996) thinks that the "order" of incremental multiple attributes is usually: restrictive attributes (indicating time and space, quantity, ownership and scope) precede descriptive attributes (indicating shape, characteristics, materials, methods and uses); The attribute with "de" comes before the attribute without "de"; Among many attributives with "de", possessive words are dominant, followed by nouns indicating place and time, followed by phrases, adjectives and possessive nouns. Among many attributives without "de", words indicating possessive cases take the first place, quantifiers take the second place, adjectives take the third place and non-possessive nouns take the last place. Huang borong and Liao xudong (1997: 83-84) think that "the order of multi-layer attributives is always arranged according to logical relations, and the attributives that are more closely related to the head language are closer to the head language", and on this basis, the general order of multi-layer attributives is described as: words indicating possessive relations > words indicating time and place > demonstrative pronouns or quantifier phrases > verb words and subject-predicate phrases. Lu (1988) summarized the order of many attributes from the perspective of semantic types of attributes as follows: time > shape > color > material and function.
label
English and Chinese have similarities and differences in the order of noun modifiers. This can not only provide evidence for the study of language typology, but also provide a cognitive window for explaining human cognitive mechanism, especially human cognitive choice and information processing ability and mechanism. As mentioned above, the prepositive modifiers are the majority in Chinese, followed by the objective existence of linguistic facts and the tendency of the postmodifiers to move forward in English, which reflects the limitation of human information processing ability (psychologists have pointed out that the limit of short-term memory of human brain is 7+/-2 words, and in the process of listening and reading, the brain is synchronizing "chunks", that is, several related words form a chunk as a unit of memory and understanding. The postposition of important modifiers reflects the mechanism and strategy of putting unknown and prominent new information at the end of sentences when people process and express them. Therefore, it is of certain significance and value to study and compare the position and order of noun modifiers in different languages.
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