Chinese, an isolating language, displays some grammatical phenomena which do not belong to typical isolating languages. It is significant to account for such special and surface phenomena, which may contribute to linguistic research as in typology and crosslinguistic comparisons. Taking Transformational-Generative grammar as the theoretical framework, Professor Waltraud Paul’s new book, New Perspectives on Chinese Syntax, takes some controversial grammatical structures, such as word order, linguistic category and basic syntactic structure, as researching objects. Through careful observations and fine-grained descriptions, Paul deconstructs typological generations and makes reasonable explanations for relevant linguistic facts. According to the author, Chinese is shown to have always displayed SVO order through the diachronic development of more than three thousand years. Prepositions, postposition and adjective in Chinese are separate categories, topic in Chinese can be used to express both given information and new information, and sentence final particle in Chinese is a head of C. Finally, Paul points out that the concept of cross-categorial harmony derived from order typology is the generation of typology, which is of a fundamentally statistical nature, and therefore such typology is not a constituent part of Universal Grammar. The book greatly deepens understandings of Chinese grammar, supports that Chinese, as other languages, co-exists universality and specificity as well, and highlights the significances of Chinese in global general linguistics.

Keywords： Waltraud Paul; New Perspectives on Chinese Syntax; review; Transformational-Generative grammar