A Comparative Study Of The Word Order Of Verb, Object, And Manner Adverbial In English And French In Typological Perspective

In this paper, we discuss the similarities and differences of the word order of verb, object, and manner adverbial between English and French in contemporary typological perspective, especially the difference of the word order VMO(Verb-Manner Adverbial-Object) and its using conditions in these two languages.There are four parts in this paper. Firstly, we briefly introduce the overview of the word order of the structure of verb, object, and manner adverbial in French and English. By material statistics of this structure of two novels—Animal Farm, The Little Prince in their French and English versions, it comes to a conclusion: the main difference of this structure in these two languages is the word order VMO. Secondly, by comparative study of the statistical materials of this structure in French and English, it comes to a further argument: in French, it is easier to tolerate the word order VMO than that of in English. Thirdly, we try to explain this phenomenon and the motivation of using the word order VMO in these two languages with the theories of “The Principle of Inner-short Outer-long”, “The Distance-Marking Correspondence” and “The Principle of Head Proximity”. And lastly, by doing research of the word order VMO in other VO languages(including Spanish, Portuguese, Indonesian, Vietnamese, Italian, Romanian and Modern Chinese), we preliminarily deduce that it is easier to tolerate the word order VMO in VO languages which put adjectives after nouns(such as French)than those putting adjectives before nouns(such as English).