In this study, I investigate how Mandarin Chinese speakers
manage the information flow of nominal referents across
grammatical roles in different discourse, in trying to
understand the intricate relationship between Chinese discourse
and the shape of its grammar. The conversation text and the
two types of oral narratives are taken as distinct types of
speaking for purposes of examining the potential text- type
difference against a cluster of information flow properties:
information status, identifiability, generality, humanness and
topic continuity. The S and O roles in the preverbal position
are also distinguished from those in the postverbal position.
The unique and recurrent patterning of information status
across conversation and narrative discourse suggests a
pragmatic motivation for word order. The preverbal roles, be
it A, S or O, have a great propensity for given information;
the postverbal roles, either S or O, maintain a much higher
incidence of new information. This lack of accusative or
ergative alignment of grammatical roles has parallel in syntax
where the major syntactic processes treat A, S and O in the
same way. The inconsistent patterning of identifiability,
generality and humanness across the three texts reveals that
they are measures of text- type difference. Semantics in terms
of humanness is rather related to another aspect of discourse--
topic continuity. Not only are humans most likely to be
mentioned again as topics, but human nominals in whatever
grammatical role also tend to re-appear in A or S where humans
typically take place. Non-humans, on the other hand, are
usually brought up again in O where referents of this type
readily occur. To sum up, the fact that grammatical role is not
the primary determinant of information patterning, topicality
and syntactic processes indicates an iconicity between
discourse and syntax.