Characteristic syntactic patterns of Mandarin Chinese

Since Ma (1898), and Wang (1938) in particular, the search for Chinese-specific grammatical patterns has become an important goal of Chinese grammar research, and many valuable attempts and contributions have been made in this direction. However, in the absence of a typological perspective, most previously identified “unique” characteristics are hardly unique. In contrast to previous research, this paper takes the angle of language universality and diversity and explores several idiosyncratic and cross-linguistically unusual syntactic patterns of Mandarin Chinese, seeking to identify some truly Chinese-specific structures.