A Study Of Word Order Differences Between English And Chinese Modifiers And Their Reasons

English and Chinese are quite different in many ways.Grammar is the constituent rule of language,and there are many differences between the grammars of different languages.Word order is an important marker of grammar.There are also many differences between English and Chinese in word order.Modifiers are abundant in both English and Chinese,both of which are used to modify and limit the key words.They enrich the content of sentences,make the language more vivid and specific,and play an important role in the expression of sentence meaning.Therefore,it is of great significance to study the differences between English and Chinese modifiers in word order.This paper mainly uses three research methods: corpus analysis,contrastive analysis and literature survey to analyze the word order differences in English and Chinese modifiers.Starting from modifiers,modifiers are divided into noun modifiers,verb modifiers and adjective modifiers in detail,and the word order of the above three modifiers in the comparative corpus of English and Chinese is analyzed respectively.Most of the examples studied in this article are from the book Jane Eyre by C.Bronte.The Chinese translation was translated by Huang Yuanshen and published by Shanghai translation publishing house in 1980.Through this study,it is found that the word order of modifiers in English and Chinese is regular.When phrases and clauses are used as noun modifiers,Chinese modifiers are placed before the central word,while English modifiers are placed after the central word.In English,verb modifiers are usually placed after,while in Chinese,verb modifiers can be placed before or after the main word.In both English and Chinese,adjective modifiers are placed before the central word,while phrases are usually placed after in English and before in Chinese.Differences in thinking patterns,graphics-background theory and sentence extension mechanisms all explain exactly why these differences occur.In the way of thinking,Chinese people attach great importance to parataxis,and the grammatical feature is implicit.In English,hypotaxis and grammatical features are dominant,and the central word is often placed before the modifier.Graphics-background theory indicates the order in which people observe the center of things and the background,which is reflected in language,resulting in the difference in the order of modifiers and central words.Under the cognitive mode of graphic-background,the word order of English modifier structure is "central word + modifier",while Chinese modifier +central word ".In the same way,the sentence extension mechanism also reflects the characteristics of sentence extension.The English sentence is a cis-linear extension,whose direction is from left to right(LR),while the Chinese sentence extensionmechanism is an inverse linear extension,that is,from right to left(RL).English sentences should be closed at the beginning of the sentence and closed at the end of the sentence.In Chinese,the modifier should be placed at the beginning of the sentence because of the opening of the sentence.This study enriches the ontological study of English and Chinese,helps to further broaden the perspective of the contrast between English and Chinese word orders,and provides theoretical guidance for English teaching and teaching Chinese as a foreign language.