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(«¿¿¿¿»). 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 ( «¿¿¿¿») 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 PART IReference 1 Chinese nouns and non-referential expression 2 Referential vs. non-referential: the possessive construction 3 Indefinite objects in ba-sentences 4 Functional extension of the reference category PART IIGrammatical categories 5 Space and time: cognitive basis and functional shifting of word classes 6 Rhetorical conversion and grammatical conversion 7 Scope and hierarchies of qualitative adjectives 8 Predicate adjectives in modern Chinese 9 Grammaticalization of the tentative category Bibliography Index