II. Some distinctive features of Chinese

The sentence structure of Chinese is looser than that of English, and the sentence boundary is also "larger". In English, almost every sentence requires a subject and a Verb; it is, however, not necessary the case in Chinese. The grammaticalization relies more on "idea-joining" (y*h5) than "form agreement" (x^ngh5), due to -- perhaps, partially the topic-prominent feature of Chinese and partially its simplicity of grammar. In other words, whether a sentence is acceptable or not grammatically depends on largely on whether it makes sense logically and meaningfully in the specific context. When there is no ambiguity in meaning, the subject of a sentence may be omitted, whether it is a Noun, a Verb, an Adjective, or a Numeral. Unlike English, these parts of speech may function as a predicate in a sentence, too. For example:

3) [omission of the subject]

zh7 f4ng x*n (w0) xi6 le s`n ti`n c1i xi6 w1n.

this MW letter, (I) write PFV. three days then write finish

I have spent three days to finish writing this letter.

4) [omission of Verb, Noun as predicate]

xi2o w1ng (sh*) Ni}yu4 r5n

little Wang, (is) New Yorker

Little Wang is a New Yorker.

5) [subjectless, Verbless, Adjective as predicate]

j%nti`n b] r7 zu9ti`n r7

today not hot, yesterday hot

It is not hot today, but it was hot yesterday.

6) [ Numeral as predicate]

t` j%nni1n sh^ b` su*

he this year eighteen years (old)

He is eighteen years old this year.

Because of the above-mentioned characteristics, Chinese syntax can tolerate the omission of, not only a single subject in a sentence, but also several subjects in a group of clauses or even sentences as long as these clauses or sentences are within the same topic chain. It is not unusual to see a single subject that takes several verb phrases without using any conjunctions ("and", "but", "if" etc.) in a sentence. It is not strange to find several clauses/small sentences (with or without their subjects) making comments on a common topic (that is, a subject matter), or following the development or an event, neither. In addition, it is possible for a Chinese sentence to have multiple layers of logical relationships, that is, a "big sentence" that consists of several complex sentences with "because" and "therefore", "although" and "but", "if" and "then", etc. all tangled together. While this is considered ungrammatical in English and is called "run-on sentence", it is quite common in Chinese, parcticularly in formal, written language.

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