Word Order in Mandarin Chinese and Grammatical Relations

It has been argued by LaPolla (1993, 1995) and Van Valin and LaPolla (1997) -among others -that word order in Mandarin Chinese (henceforth MC) is (almost) exclusively determined by informational/communicative considerations. Though it cannot be denied that word order does encode informative/communicative considerations such as identifiability, foregrounding, and focalization, it is argued here that word order also encodes grammatical relations and that word order in MC can be nicely accounted for if stated in terms of subject, direct and indirect object. To put it briefly, in both communicatively unmarked and marked basic/ordinary sentences, the subject must occur in immediate pre-verbal position (except for unidentifiable subjects in basic sentences), and the indirect object necessarily appears in immediate post-verbal position. If subjects and (morphologically unmarked) indirect objects occupy any other position, the sentence is ungrammatical. As for the direct object, it must appear in immediate post-verbal position in unmarked ordinary monotransitive sentences and immediately after the indirect object in unmarked ordinary ditransitive sentences. Note that the thematic role of the subject, direct object, or indirect object does not affect word order in any way.