Bojiang Zhang is a professor from the Institute of Literature, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. He is currently the Editor-in-chief of Literary Review（《文学评论》). He is also a professor at University of Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Fudan University and Renmin University of China. He has been working on syntactic theory, functional grammar and discourse analysis of Chinese.Mei Fang is a professor from the Institute of Linguistics, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. She is currently the Deputy Editor-in-chief of Studies of the Chinese Language ( 《中国语文》) and the vice president of Chinese Language Society. She has been working on Chinese grammar and discourse analysis with the functional approach, focusing on the emergent nature of grammatical patterns, pragmaticalization, and grammar in interaction.

• List of figures List of tables List of abbreviations Introduction: corpus and approach PART IInformation structure 1 Thematic structure of spoken Pekingese 2 Thematic structure in narration: sentence-middle modal particles 3 Thematic structure in conversation: an analysis of translocation PART IIFocus structure 4 Word order: object vs. directional complement 5 Word order: object vs. verbal classifier 6 Means for contrastive focus representation PART IIIBackgrounding constructions 7 A transitivity interpretation of serial verb constructions in Chinese 8 Imperfective clause "V着" 9 Zero cataphora of clause subject Bibliography Index