A Contrastive Study Of Attributive's Word Order Between Chinese And English

Attributive is a common grammatical ingredient shared by Chinese and English. Chinese belongs to the analytic language, and the order of its attributive is fixed and always put before the central word. But sometimes it will appear in the hyper-correct place out of the rhetoric or emphatic needs, such as the phenomenon of pre-attributive. As a kind of synthetic language, the attributive place of English is flexible because the single word can be put before the central word and the considerably complicated attributive as relative clause tends to appear after the central word. In another word, English is a kind of transitional language towards analytic language for its fixed but flexible word order, which is same with Chinese to some extent, and results in the comparative foundation between each other.However, most of the modern research are descriptive and lack of thorough explanation. In order to give further details, this paper will discuss the place of attributive between Chinese and English respectively from three aspects and render comparison at last, especially the relation between the attributive and the central word.The first chapter aims to give a integrative narration. The former research about the place of attributive are summarized from the semantic and cognitive level and the usage of pre-attributive and post attributive of English is discussed. At last, a comparison is given, from which the similarities and differences are set out.The second chapter gives the definition of Chinese attributive and its classification, then analyzes its places before and after the central word based on the three levels: semantics, pragmatics and cognitivism.The third chapter classifies the English attributive and analyzes its place in sentence from the semantic, pragmatic and cognitive levels, among which the analysis of pre-attributive and post attributive are the main point.The last chapter is about comparison. Firstly, it discusses from the semantic level with the principle of semantic closing and finds that the ingredient served as pre-attributive are same roughly between Chinese and English, but the differences lie in the post attributive, especially the relative clause. Secondly, from the cognitive level, it gets the consistency of the Chinese and English attributive with the theory of figure-background, but there are huge differences about the post attributive for the different cognitive habits between the two nations. Last but not least, it compares the two language's attributive place from the cognitive level using the principle of end-weight and end-focus. About the attributive, it concludes that the phenomenon of moving-forward in English and the post-attributive of Chinese are roughly same with the purpose of emphasizing and modifying the central word and seeking the balance of sentence structure.