A Comparative Study On Modifiers Between English And Uyghur Language

Almost no language exists in the world without modification system as it is anindispensible part of every language with its vital role of providing furtherinformation and clarifying sentence meaning. Different languages have differentmodificational structures and positional tendencies. This paper mainly deals with thestructural and positional similarities and differences of modifiers between English andUyghur language. Even though English and Uyghur language belong to differentlanguage families, they still share some structural and positional similarities withshowing their distinctive features. In the meantime, the structural and positionaldifferences and similarities embodied by two languages can be explained by suchtheories as word order typology, heaviness hierarchy and figure and ground theory.Through comparison, it is found that both in English and Uyghur, there aresimilar modifying components such as nouns, adjectives, pronouns, numerals,participles, gerunds and relative clauses. At the same time, there are infinitives,adverbs and prepositional phrases in English to serve as modifiers whileonomatopoeia and postpositional phrases can serve as modifiers in Uyghur. As tomultiple premodifiers, both English and Uyghur have the order: possessives>adjectives> attributive nouns and adjectives denoting subjective evaluation>adjectives denoting objective evaluation. Numerals and demonstratives are ratherflexible in Uyghur while they are relatively fixed in English.Word order typology is one of the new areas in which scholars present us withthe correlations of word order with other language elements including elementsserving as modifiers. In accordance with this theory, genitives (of genitive) andrelative clauses are placed after head word as most SVO languages do in the worldlike English while these elements are put after head word as most SOV languages dolike Uyghur. Heaviness hierarchy is another theory put forward by Hawkins. Peopletend to put heavy, complicated elements in the end to ease the memory burden as it is the case in English phrasal and clausal postmodificational structures. The last but notthe least one is figure and ground theory in which it is said that people of differentlanguages may perceive objects from different angles, i.e., some perceive from centralobject to objects around it and others from objects around to central objects. Englishand Uyghur thinking mode is in conformity with this theory and modifiers can bearranged in from figure to ground and ground to figure respectively.