1.1 Overview
通过比较分析发现英语中存在着诸如名词,形容词关系从句等类似的名词修饰的成分。The study of modification is essential for appropriate understanding of nominalconstructions in a language.It is one of the prime means to extend sentence meaningand provide contextual coherence.However,it had been long being neglected to studymodifiers up to recent years as they were treated as additional elements of a language,only playing the role of elaborating sentence meaning and contextual binding.In fact,it is an irrefutable truth that sometimes without modification it is impossible toconvey the full meaning of a sentence and the role of modifiers weighs far more than is expected.
Although example(1a)is grammatically correct,it does not give anyinformation about he as the pronoun he itself conveys the message a man.Therefore,it does not make sense to any readers unless a specific context is given or added somemodifying elements and they would keep questioning what kind of a man he is.Example(1b)is also confusing and unacceptable without modification or context asthe definite article restricts the word man to its particular context or modifier.Withoutproper modification,readers cannot catch who is indicated in the sentence,too.Fromthese examples it is obvious that modification is essential part for a language to offernecessary information to the reader and contribute its part largely to the understandingof a sentence meaning.
As it is also the case in Uyghur language,the idea of making contrasts betweenthese two languages on their modification part attracted my interest.To the author?sobservation,both languages have their modification system,sharing some structuralsimilarities and differences with their own distinctive features.Here similarities anddifferences are only applied to structures at the surface level which are observable tois expected.the naked eye,especially to the position of modifiers at most times.The existence ofmodification system in both languages provides basis for holding contrastive studythough these two languages belong to different language families.As is known to all,English is a synthetic-analytic language with the basic word order SVO and has lessmorphological changes of words while Uyghur language is an agglutinative languagewith the basic word order SOV and with morphological abundance.Englishsometimes depends on morphological changes to express various grammaticalmeanings,but,at most times,still relies on constituent order while Uyghur language,on all occasions,resort to morphological changes of words to mark the mutualrelations between language elements.Therefore,the change of constituent order forthe languages like English which largely rely on the position of constituents in asentence means the change of grammatical and semantic relations between them..
From examples(3a)and(3b),we can see that the change of position between and Jon does not affect the grammatical and semantic relations between the verband them as the word Jon takes accusative case(acc henceforth)marker–ni with itself.As is shown in example(3b)if we say“Jon–ni M?ri k?r–di.”,it still has the samemeaning with“Mary saw John.”with the only change of its topicality or focality.Therefore,with overt grammatical case markers,it is easy to identify the relationsbetween elements in Uyghur language regardless of their order in a sentence.In anutshell,case plays a more vital role in deciding relations of elements in Uyghurwhile in English word order also weighs more for deciding relations betweenelements.Whatis more,the differences in basic word order between English and Uyghurlanguage,at the sametime,contribute fairly to the different order of some elements intwo languages according to Greenbergian word order correlations.With regard to therelations between basic word order and language elements,Greenberg(1963)established three most frequent basic word order patterns,namely SVO,SOV andVSO.More importantly he shows the correlations between VO/OV and otherelements.For i
