Spatial Sequence and Word Order

Studies of word order in cognitive-functional linguistics are found to emphasize temporal sequence to the disregard of spatial sequence. Therefore some of the word order problems remain unexplained. Adopting the notion of spatial sequence, this paper attempts a unified interpretation of these problems in Chinese and English, and suggests that besides temporal sequence, spatial sequence also accounts for word order arrangement and reflects the mechanism of human cognition. The studies in this line will help further the research on language universals.