ABSTRACT
When words combine to form phrases and sentences, they follow certain rules. This chapter focuses on the syntactic rules of Nantong Chinese. It starts with the definition and classification of phrases, followed by a presentation of various phrase structure rules and transformational rules. It then tackles the difficult issue of what qualifies as a sentence in Nantong Chinese and argues that a sentence in this language is simply a phrase that carries out a specific speech act. This chapter also demonstrates that most different sentence types are derived from phrase types. The chapter concludes with discussions of how interrogative sentences are formed and how grammatical functions such as topic, focus and contrast are achieved in Nantong Chinese.
