This study uses Firbas' theory of Communicative Dynamism to examine the subject, verb and object ordering in Mandarin Chinese. It is shown that the Chinese word order is more determined by information structuring constraints than by syntactic considerations. Chinese thus arranges the ordering of major elements according to their amount of Communicative Dynamism (CD): the less CD an element possesses, the more it will be positioned towards the left of the sentence. As this pragmatic constraint is very strong, some of its aspects have been grammaticalized.