ABSTRACT
Each and every language has its own system of syntactic rules, which is a determining factor of the law for word order. In the meantime, language, as an important tool for human communication, is used by people to satisfy communicative needs, which preordains that word order is also arranged for information transmission, a common feature shared by various languages. This chapter focuses on the study of the information structure in spoken Chinese, with a view to exploring the functional constraints on Chinese word order.
