ABSTRACT
The most compelling results of modern Chinese grammar research have focused on the formal analysis of syntactic structures. In the late 1980s, functionalism was introduced to the study of Chinese grammar, and the functional approach has shown strong vitality ever since. Admittedly discourse structure and syntactic structure belong to different systems. Scholars have noticed the connections between syntactic structure and some of the factors related to speech production, such as pause, stress, sentence-middle modal particles, etc., and used such connections to identify certain syntactic properties. Chinese grammarians are increasingly willing to prove the rationality of their grammar by the ease with which it can be adapted for computer use. Since the results from formal analysis are far from enough, more semantic interpretations are incorporated, which indeed are among the basic requirements for computers to comprehend and generate Chinese. The study of the grammar of spoken Pekingese is the foundation of the study of modern Chinese grammar.
