Abstract

Nominal group is always a heating study object for linguists. There are many scholars who have shed light on this field. However, among the current studies, most of them are just confined into the language of English. The contrastive study of nominal groups in English and Chinese, especially the study of the word sequence of modifiers, is rarely to be found. This paper, adopting a systemic functional approach, mainly conducted under the guidance of Halliday’s interpretation of nominal groups from the experiential point of view, attempts to make a contrastive study of the similarities and differences between Chinese and English nominal groups with respect to the word sequence of their modifiers. On the one hand, this paper is a tentative study of word sequence of the modifiers both in Chinese nominal groups and English nominal groups, aiming to make a general description of them; on the other hand, through the contrast, we are trying to enable the readers to have a better understanding of the mechanism of the modifiers in nominal groups in both languages.

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