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영어

This paper aims to account for the ordering of complements and adjuncts in English from the perspective of cognitive-functional grammar. As a point of departure, it introduces motivation, a form of Newmeyer's (1992, 1998) “structure-concept” iconicity, and its representative principle, Haiman's (1983, 1985, 1994) distance principle. Then, it is shown that when a head takes both a complement and an adjunct, the linguistic distance between the former and the head is shorter than that between the latter and the head, and so is the conceptual distance between the former and the head. This iconic interaction between linguistic distance of elements and their conceptual distance is claimed to govern the ordering of complements and adjuncts. It is also demonstrated that the ordering of the multiple adjuncts in an English phrase observes the distance principle in that the closer an adjunct is to the head conceptually, the closer it occurs to the head linguistically.