Resumen de Word order in Mandarin Chinese intransitive clauses
This study, couched in Mel'cuk's (2001) theory of communicative organization, deals with word order in simple intransitive Mandarin Chinese sentences from a communicative point of view. The Semantic-Communicative Structure of Subject-Verb, Verb-Subject, and Prolepsis-Subject-Verb sentences is described. We also demonstrate that the Rheme~Theme opposition does not affect the Subject-Verb and Verb-Subject word orders. It is shown that (i) Subject-Verb sentences are communicatively unmarked (i.e., this word order signals no particular Semantic-Communicative Structure), (ii) Verb-Subject sentences can only encode New Neutral Non-Focalized Subjects, and (iii) Prolepsis-Subject-Verb sentences encode Given Focalized Subjects.
