An analysis of the post-nominal modifiers in English and Arabic in light of cognitive grammar theory

Abstract EN

Why may a syntactic structure of an English expression differ from its Arabic counterpart though they may, semantically, convey similar or equivalent messages? Investigating resources in the two languages produces the view that the difference between these languages in terms of syntactic constructions belong to the difference between the worlds that the natives of the two languages perceive and communicate in composing these messages.

The English natives deal with the projected world (mental world of concepts) whose input is the natives‟ mental interpretations of entities in the real world.

Whereas Arabs tend to deal with the real world -as it is -in composing their messages.

This paper surveys some cases of post-nominal modifiers in English and Arabic in the light of the notion mentioned above.

It comes to the conclusion that even when the two languages happen to show similarity in terms of grammatical position of a certain linguistic unit, the difference still present in terms of the details which underlie that similarity because the entities encoded linguistically belong to different worlds.