Inviting is a ubiquitous social action. In Mandarin, invitations are realized mainly via three syntactic forms or conversational practices, namely, interrogatives in the form of “Verb-not-Verb”, imperatives, and declaratives containing the lexical item “hai” (还) or “benlai (本来). The distributional pattern of these syntactic forms is systematically related to the inviter’s anticipation of the likelihood of the success of an invitation.