Pragmatic relations are context-dependent; they are more complex and unstable, since they involve the speaker’s beliefs, assumptions and attitude. By contrast, semantic relations are stable and simple, since they reflect properties inherent in the linguistic forms and represent consistent common recognition of the objective world by the whole language community, and they are not determinable by context. For this reason, in our investigation of word order in a simple sentence, we will concentrate on the analysis of semantic relations (or semantic roles) between a clause element and the nucleus verb. Semantic relations are the simplest and most primitive relations among word order units; they can be seen as the essential, notional part of word order units. Therefore we may say that the so-called word order is in essence the order of semantic roles (Lu, 1998).
[1] Loar, J. K. (2011). Chinese syntactic grammar: functional and conceptual principles. New York: Peter Lang.
