Chinese word order will be confined to the simple sentence consisting of a single independent clause, which is generally considered the canonical form of the sentence. This is because other types of sentences, including complex and compound sentences and ‘reduced’ sentences may be explained by reference to such operations as conjunction, insertion, and substitution. Furthermore, our discussion will be restricted to the simple declarative sentence which is composed of subject and predicate. As for non-subject predicate sentence, namely sentences which do not have the form of subject or predicate (e.g., the subjectless sentence: 下雨了‘Xià yǔ le’ (It’s raining), exclamatory sentence: 好美的风景啊！‘Hǎo měi de fēngjǐng ā’ (What a beautiful the scenery!), etc. are beyond our scope of discussion.
[1] Loar, J. K. (2011). Chinese syntactic grammar: functional and conceptual principles. New York: Peter Lang.
