A Discourse Approach to Causal Sentences in Mandarin Chinese

This paper argues that the word order of adverbials can be captured only when the causal clauses are analyzed as focus. Previous studies on Chinese causal sentences usually treat the causal clauses on a par with other types of adverbial clauses. This means that they are considered as topics and predicted to precede the main clauses. However, this account does not hold for the causal clauses. According to recent corpus-based studies, they actually take up both pre-posed and post-posed positions with respect to their main clause. If the adjunct-preceding-main order is overwhelmingly used in Mandarin complex sentences, what can be the reason for that causal sequencing is different from the conditional or concessive one? We will show that it is the focal status of the causal clauses that can account for their distribution.