Abstract

Mandarin Chinese features a subject-verb-object word order and lacks grammatical agreement of any sort. It is basically a head-last language with the modifiers preceding the head word. Other prominent grammatical features include serial verb construction, resultative complement and the double nominative constructions. My paper focuses on the role of topic and subject in Mandarin, drawing on three views on Chinese syntactic structures, namely, SVO approach, topic-comment approach, and topic-prominence approach. A comparison is made among the different views and a conclusion is drawn that topic-prominent approach may better capture the complexities of Chinese syntax, which definitely contributes to English writing.

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