A Comparative Study Of The Word Order Of English And Chinese Irreversible Binomials From The Cognitive Perspective

In the comparative study of English and Chinese languages, only a few papers have dealt with the word order of English and Chinese irreversible binomials. And most of them have only described the similarities and differences between English and Chinese irreversible binomials instead of explaining them; others have just tried to find the reasons from within the language, overlooking factors outside the language, especially the cognitive factors. Recently, some scholars, e.g. Wen Xu and Lu Wei-zhong have made some improvement, compared with former scholars. However, when they are researching the factors which affect the word order of English and Chinese irreversible binomials, they do not take the sound into consideration, which makes their research incomplete.On the basis of cognitive theory, the thesis conducts a qualitative study on the word order of English and Chinese irreversible binomials. Attempting to explain rather than describe, this thesis applies theories of iconicity and markedness to explaining the similarities and differences of the word order between English and Chinese irreversible binomials and then concludes that the rule of "ease of processing" is a general rule governing the word order of English and Chinese irreversible binomials.This thesis first cites the English and Chinese irreversible binomials concerning time and space as examples, and applies the principle of sequence iconicity and the principle of proximity iconicity to explaining the cognitive reason of the similarities and differences of word order between English and Chinese irreversible binomials. Because of the limitation of the iconicity theory itself, it fails to explain the word order resulting from sound and cultural factors. In order to make our study complete, this thesis also applies the theory of markedness to comparing...