A Construction Of The Space Location Sequence Of The English Noun-Modifiers From A Cognitive Perspective

English noun phrase is an important part of sentence structure. In the study of noun phrase, modifiers are an important and complex part which make English noun phrase difficult study and complicate it. According to the relative location between English noun-modifiers and head noun, modifiers can be classified into two parts, premodifiers and post-modifiers. Modifiers that locate before noun called premodifiers, contrarily, modifiers locate after noun called post-modifiers. In general, premodifiers have stable qualifications, while postmodifiers have temporary qualifications. It is a hot issue for linguists when a large amount of premodifiers or postmodifiers turn up. For a long time, many scholars and specialists have studied this issue from structural grammar, transformational-generative grammar and cognitive grammar. Structural grammar and transformational-generative grammar are internal research of language, ignoring the relevance of meaning and external world. However, cognitive linguistics is a science that studies the relation between cognitive and language. At the same time, cognitive linguistics reflects the cognitive process of humans. As a result, from a cognitive point of view, this paper makes an explanation of the location sequence of the English noun premodifiers and postmodifiers.In this paper, iconicity theory is the theory basis and followed with subjectivity, objectivity and specificity. The basic location sequence of multi-premodifiers is reference>quantifier>description>classifier. In fact, these four parts are four continuums that make up multi-premodifiers. Each continuum is composed of different smaller continuums. The four continuums are seemly independent with each other. In reality, they interact with each other and closely linked. Iconicity is a natural relationship between language structure and human experiential structure. In the iconicity theory framework, there are three principles that guide the location sequence of multi-premodifiers, they are proximity iconicity, quantity iconicity and sequence iconicity. The proximity iconicity reflects that the closer the modifiers and the noun, the higher relevance they hold. As the quantity iconicity claims that the more concepts that modifiers express, the more language symbols that modifiers contains. It also corresponds to specificity which claims that if modifiers hold more specified information that will make language more complex. As a result, more cognitive process time is required. The sequence iconicity is that the sequence of language symbols iconic to that of concepts’. Multi-premodifiers should coincidence with subjectivity and objectivity principle when they appear before noun. It reflects that the quantification is from outward appearance to inner essence. Subjective modifies express temporary qualification, while objective modifiers express stable qualifications. The rule is subjective modifiers is further than objective modifiers to qualified the head noun. In the meantime, postmodifiers are composed of adjectives, prepositional phrase, non-restricted clause and adverbs. The paper aims to construal the distribution sequence of modifiers and different location function of cognitive space. The final goal is to apply less modifiers to qualify the head noun and to convenience communicators.The significance of the paper is to construct the continuums for the location sequence of modifiers, and make an explanation of different location function of multi-modifiers. The research of multi-modifiers of English noun phrase from a cognitive grammar point of view make foreign learners understand the nature of language much better. Simultaneously, the research demonstrates that besides arbitrariness, iconicity is also an objective property of human language.