Discontinuous Attributive Modification And Problems Of Ambiguity In Modern English

To tackle problems caused by discontinuous attributive modification, some grammarian have made efforts. Among them are Flor Aarts and Jan Aarts and Otto Jespersen. The most detailed treatment of discontinuous attributive modification is done by Randolph Quirk and his colleagues in A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language. In China, Zhang Dao Zhen and Zhang Zhen Bang have paid some attention to the discontinuous modification.However, the phenomena of discontinuous attributive modification are more varied and complicated than have been treated so far. In this paper, I will try to, first of all, sum up the previous treatment of discontinuous attributive modification and find out what is still left to be done. The major work of this paper is to present the examples of the discontinuous modification as comprehensively as possible, state the reasons of such grammatical phenomena and show the extent to which the explanations are plausible.In this paper, I intend to (1) classify the phenomena of discontinuous attributive modification in order to make clear the range of the practice of discontinuous attributive modification; (2) find out why discontinuous attributive modification, in some circumstances, cannot be avoided?for what purposes such grammatical means are employed; and (3) deal with the ambiguity which is bound to arise when it is not easy to decide which is the noun head.