A Contrastive Sludy Of Constituent Order Of Modifiers In English And Chinese About The House On Manco Street

It is quite different between Chinese and English in many aspects, such as grammar,the rules of constructing a language. Word order is an important marking method ingrammar, there must be many differences in Chinese and English word order. In thesetwo languages, there are quite abundant numbers of modifiers. It is the component tomodify and qualify the center words. The modifiers’ function is to enrich the content ofthe sentence, to make the language more vivid, and it is extremely significant inexpressing the meaning of a sentence. Therefore, the comparative study of modifierorder between Chinese and English is necessary and important. Most of the previousstudy is to research the differences between Chinese and English from the macroscopicperspective, such as the hypotaxis and parataxis; the dominant and recessive in Chineseand English and so on. There are fewer studies on word order research, especially themodifiers’ word order as well as its reason. This paper mainly starts from the modifiers,and divide it into nouns modifiers, verbs modifiers and adjective modifiers, bases onThe House on Mango Street, the original text and its Chinese version as the material tocompare the modifiers’ order in these two languages. From the contrasts, we can findthat the order differences between Chinese and English are regular, which comes fromthe divergences between the thinking modes of the two nations. It can give us moredetail reasons to explain that through the graphics-background theory and sentenceextension mechanism. From the linguistic perspective, the research on the modifiers’word order of Chinese and English not only enrich the ontology study of the twolanguages, but also could supply the theoretical guidance of English teaching andteaching Chinese as a second language efficiently.