A Cognitive And Pragmatic Analysis Of The Ordering Of Multiple Attributives Of English Sentences

The ordering of multiple attributives in English has been a difficult task for manylanguage users, especially for EFL learners because of its flexibility and complexity.Hence, the issues about the ordering of multiple attributives have been discussed andconcerned for a long period among linguists and experts of related fields. Somelinguists studied it on the sentential level. They explain the ordering of multipleattributives by syntactic rules and semantic rules. Some pedagogic experts payattention to summarize the workable rules of the ordering of multiple attributives inEFL instruction. And some translators endeavor to give a contrastive study to show thesimilarities and differences on the ordering of multiple attributives betweentarget-language nominal constructions and source-language nominal constructions.Few could give a specific and systematic study on explanation of working principles inthe ordering of multiple attributives of English sentence.The paper, intended to make an explanatory study on the ordering of multipleattributives in English nominal constructions, mainly aims at solving the followingproblem: how do these working principles of the ordering multiple attributives inEnglish sentences come into being? And it includes two sub-problems:1) what arecognitive mechanisms of the ordering of multiple attributives in English sentences?2)are these working principles of the ordering multiple attributives in English sentencesrational in pragmatics?To solve this problem, some specific examples should be selected from the rawmaterials—scientific articles and literature articles firstly. Next, those examples areallotted to three types—multiple pre-attributives, multiple post-attributives, multiplemix-attributives—for research by author according to attributive words’ location. Then,both iconicity principles and economic principle in cognitive linguistics are introducedto explain how these three types of multiple attributes were arranged in linear structure. And the iconicity principles include three sub-principles, namely, the principle ofproximity, the principles of sequence, and the principle of number. What’s more, it isthe competitions between them that count for the ordering of multiple attributives.Concretely speaking, the competition between the principle of proximity and economicprinciple mainly counts for the ordering of multiple pre-attributives; the competitionbetween the principle of sequence and economic principle mainly counts for theordering of multiple mix-attributives; the competition between the sequence of numberand economic principle mainly counts for the multiple post-attributives. Finally,cooperative principles in pragmatics are introduced to testify whether the conclusionsis proper or not in actual language use. The cooperative principles include foursub-principles: the maxim of quality, the maxim of quantity, the maxim of relation, themaxim of manner. As for the properness of the ordering of multiple attributives, all ofthree types completely follow the maxim of quality and the maxim of relation; themultiple pre-attributives seems more to follow the maxim of quality; and the multiplepost-attributives seems more to follow the maxim of manner.There are still some issues should be paid attention in future study，for example，the range of sampling is comparably simple, the examples are normal ordering inEnglish and so on. At the end, some solutions will be provided for future study.