A grammar is the system of knowledge of the relation between what people do and what people know when they use a particular language. Since what people know in the context of their language use is often implicit, linguistic theories are proposed as a foundational hypothesis to enable the explicit explanation of a grammar of any particular language. This presents an underlying dilemma in the writing of any grammar. On the one hand, descriptive work is the foundation of any scientific study and is crucial to the language sciences. Modern linguistics emerged as a result of a conscientious effort to move from prescriptive to descriptive studies of language. On the other hand, once any theoretical framework or account is adopted, a grammar becomes prescriptive in the sense that it imposes a set of conceptual primitives and structure of rules prescribed by a sub-set of linguists. How to capture the system of implicit knowledge without prescribing an a priori theoretical framework remains the biggest challenge to any descriptive grammar.

A Reference Grammar of Chinese meets this challenge with an empirical approach focused on describing what people do when they use Mandarin Chinese, while allowing generalizations to emerge from our descriptions as well as from the readers’ observation of the data. We believe that a keenly observed description of the generalizations and tendencies based on the observation of the extensive data of language use will lead to capturing the implicit knowledge people share without prescribing an explicit rule. To achieve this goal, corpora and Web-extracted examples are used extensively, with an occasional supplementation of made-up sentences. These data have been carefully examined by our authors for their distributional patterns and tendencies. None of the examples cited in this grammar are single instances of language use; rather, they were chosen as an illustrative representation based on a set of similar examples selected by the authors. In other words, this reference grammar is intended to be read like a guide to the Chinese language, mediated by an extensive set of extracted examples for each grammatical point we make. Readers can consult the example database when they read the grammar to strengthen both their understanding of the generalizations and the complexity of language in use.