A Contrastive Study Of The Ordering Of Premodifiers In English And Chinese Nominal Constructions In A Cognitive Perspective

The paper, intended to make a contrastive study on the similarities and differences of multiple premodifiers in English and Chinese nominal constructions, mainly aims at solving the following problems: How are multiple premodifiers in English and Chinese nominal constructions distributed? What similarities and differences are there in the ordering of multiple premodifiers in English and Chinese? What is the motivation behind these similarities and differences?The issue of the ordering of multiple premodifiers has been concerned and discussed for a long period among linguists. Many predecessors have made great contributions in this aspect, mainly including classifying of premodifiers, description of the ordering of premodifiers and explanation of the ordering from syntactic, semantic and functional perspectives. After reviewing and summarizing their theories, the author makes an effort to give a systemic explanation and analysis to the ordering of multiple premodifiers in English and Chinese in a cognitive approach.The author has summarized the similarities and differences of the ordering of multiple premodifiers in English and Chinese by collecting data from descriptive works and analyzing the semantic and grammatical categories of these premodifiers. Multiple premodifiers in English and Chinese share a common order, namely, they are distributed according to the order of determinative, descriptive and classifying premodifiers. The differences are mainly on the ordering of premodifiers denoting nationality, time and location.The author gives a systemic explanation to the similarities and differences of the ordering of multiple premodifiers in English and Chinese by combining the concept of salience in cognitive grammar established by Langacker (1987) and Spreading Activation Model raised by Collins and Loftus (1975).In cognitive grammar, salience means different focus of attention. When people are observing and cognizing certain entity, they will focus on some aspects or parts of the entity. The parts which are given more attention to are the salient parts, and others are less salient parts comparatively. In nominal constructions with multiple premodifiers, the degree of salience of these premodifiers is not totally the same. Through the analysis of data collected, the author gets the conclusion that premodifiers which are closer to the head word have higher degree of salience.Then how are these premodifiers with different degrees of salience processed cognitively?To solve this problem, the author employs Spreading Activation Model raised by Collins and Loftus (1975). According to the author, one nominal construction forms a network of senses and concepts with the head word as the center. When people observe and cognize certain entity, the concept or image of the entity linguistically realized by the head word will be activated. Then the activation will pass along the links between these nodes to other concepts. Nodes representing multiple premodifiers are linked to the node of the head word, but there are differences on their priority to be activated. The concepts which have the priority to be activated first are those with the highest degree of salience, namely, the premodifiers which are closest to the head word and indicate the intrinsic prosperities of the entity. Then activation will pass along the links to those less salient concepts, namely, premodifiers which are farther to the head word and indicate the extrinsic properties even the extension of the entity. When all the corresponding concepts of premodifiers are activated, the cognitive processing of the entity will be finished and both speakers and listeners achieve agreement on the conceived entity.The differences of the ordering of multiple premodifiers in English and Chinese can also be explained with the concept of degree of salience. When one premodifier is moved forward or backward to some special positions, their degree of salience as well as their semantic categories and functions will also change, which often results to the change of the meaning of nominal constructions.However, it is difficult to explain the deviating order of some multiple premodifiers with the same cognitive regularity, for the ordering of language is a complex phenomenon influenced by many factors, and it is impossible to solve the problem in only one field. The author finds that the ordering of premodifiers is influenced by various factors, including cognitive factors, semantic factors, phonological and syntactic factors as well as pragmatic factors, but each of them plays a different role. Cognitive factors are explanatory and only explain the linear order of the constructions without determining which construction will be used in a group of constructions with similar meanings. Semantic factors are decisive, but the ordering of premodifiers will be based on semantic factors only in standard ordering. Phonological and syntactic factors are compulsory, for they usually have priority over other factors. Pragmatic factors are selective, for they determine which construction will be used in a group of constructions with similar meanings and can usually achieve special communicative effects.What is more, the concept of degree of salience can also be used to explain other types of premodifiers even constructions with similar groups of linguistic elements. Therefore, the study of the ordering of premodifiers has great theoretical and practical significance.