The Language Types of Word Order in Chinese and Arabic and Their Dominant Cognitive Principles

Document Type : Scientific research papers

Author

Department of Chinese Faculty of Al-Alsun, Ain Shams University

Abstract

The study of word order is a hot topic in modern typological linguistics research. This paper discusses the language type of Chinese and Arabic sentence word order, including the word order of main components and modifiers, and finds that the Chinese and Arabic word order are completely different. We believe that this is related to the differences in the cognitive models and ways of thinking of the two languages users. This paper attempts to explain the differences in word order between Chinese and Arabic by using some cognitive principles. We use the "sequence iconicity principle" and the "distance iconicity principle" to make a cognitive explanation of the main components word order, and use "moving-ego" and "moving-object" strategy to make a cognitive explanation of the modifiers word order. In order to prove that the differences of Chinese and Arabic word order is not random, and it has certain cognitive rules.

Keywords

Files

Share

How to cite

Statistics