Why Such Word Order as “On the stage were sitting X”/“Y died his father”?—A Functional Account of Message-Salient Constructions in Modern Chinese

The identification of grammatical relations of clausal constructions in Modern Chinese has been problematic since the issue caught people's attention and aroused extensive debates in the middle 1950s and afterwards.This study furthers the discussions from the perspective of the three meta-functions, namely, ideational, interpersonal and textual, of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL).It explains why there have been such constructions and their variants.Although a clause realizes the three meta-functions simultaneously, one or two of them have salient priority over the other(s) under different contexts.This paper focuses on those cases that prioritize the textual functions.Then two related types based on their thematic and information statuses are sorted out:"marked topical theme + unmarked end-focus" and "marked/unmarked topical theme + unmarked end-focus".This approach can shed light on investigating other typical constructions that are salient with ideational and/or interpersonal functions.