A Tentative Analysis of Chinese Syntactic Constructions

This paper takes the Chinese syntactic construction as its focus, holding that the pragmatic elements are attributable to the variety of Chinese syntactic constructions. Compared with the English language, the Chinese language is much more flexible in word order and less rigid in the corresponding relationship between thematic roles and syntactic arguments. In the light of the analysis of syntactic subject and object, the paper argues that the Chinese language should be defined as containing topic-prominent rather than subject-prominent structures.