A Contrastive Study Of Constituent Order Of Modifiers In English And Chinese

English and Chinese have hardly any kinship and contrast sharply in various facets: sound system, writing system (phonographic vs. ideographic), grammar system and respective culture matrix. They also present conspicuous differences in terms of constituent order, one of the important grammatical means in both languages. The focus of the research work of this thesis is on the differences between constituent order of English and Chinese modifiers. But before exploring this subject, the author firstly makes a contrastive analysis of the grammatical features of the two languages from the macroscopic perspective. Differences in constituent order are absolutely not an isolating phenomenon, but closely related with other grammatical features of languages. So a macroscopic contrastive analysis will lay a sound theoretical foundation for constituent order study. As mentioned above, English and Chinese contrast sharply in various facets, but the author mainly focuses on four aspects, which may influence the distribution of constituent order. (1) synthetic vs. analytic. (2) hypotactic vs. paratactic (3) convergent vs. divergent (4) static vs. dynamic.After making a contrastive study from the macroscopic perspective, the author moves on to the focus and body of the thesis: contrast between...