ABSTRACT
This chapter demonstrates how the prosodic system interacts with register grammar giving rise to what is now called prosodic register grammar in Chinese. Although the register grammar is newly developed in Chinese, it has also been found effective in other languages as well. The dative construction in English is a typical example of this kind. It has long been a mystery as to why some verbs cannot be used in the dative construction. The studies about the function of human languages have proposed the notions of style, register, genre and even stylo-grammar in past decades. Register grammar is recognized first in the study of written Chinese. The formal Chinese writing system was newly developed after the May Fourth Movement in 1919. Before then, Chinese intellectuals wrote in Classical Chinese. It has been a traditional dilemma of separating colloquial expressions from literary diction in forming modern vernacular writing over the past 100 years in Chinese philology.
