Abstract

Chinese, English, and French language systems contain the grammatical component of attributive, but due to the differences in cultural background and expression habits, they often present different expression modes and orders in practical application. Attentive is a modification restriction component commonly used in Chinese, English, and French, so there are many definitions related to the attributive. However, they share one commonality: the attributive typically provides a definitive or updated function for nouns. Based on the perspective of typology, this article systematically compares the tagging patterns of the attribute between Chinese, English, and French. Using the Chinese attribute-head construction as a model, analyze the grammatical features of nouns, adjectives, and verbs as attributives in three languages. Research has found that Chinese uses “de” as the core marker to modify the noun; English and Chinese use adjective word order, verb participle, subordinate clause, and prepositional phrase to mark attributives; in the noun phrase, the modifier is in front of the noun in Chinese, while in English and French, it can be placed in front and behind, but English and French are flexible. The differences among the three languages stem from the characteristics of language types and cognitive strategies. Chinese emphasizes meaning and resemblance, while English and French emphasize form and disambiguation.