This article concerns Modern Standard Chinese. For the grammars of other forms or varieties of Chinese, see their respective articles via links on Chinese language and varieties of Chinese.
中文语法 [中文語法], meaning "Chinese grammar", written vertically in simplified (left) and traditional (right) forms
The grammar of Standard Chinese shares many features with other varieties of Chinese. The language almost entirely lacks inflection; words typically have only one grammatical form. Categories such as number (singular or plural) and verb tense are often not expressed by grammatical means, but there are several particles that serve to express verbal aspect and, to some extent, mood.
The basic word order is subject–verb–object (SVO), as in English. Otherwise, Chinese is chiefly a head-final language, meaning that modifiers precede the words that they modify. In a noun phrase, for example, the head noun comes last, and all modifiers, including relative clauses, come in front of it. This phenomenon, however, is more typically found in subject–object–verb languages, such as Turkish and Japanese.
Chinese frequently uses serial verb constructions, which involve two or more verbs or verb phrases in sequence. Chinese prepositions behave similarly to serialized verbs in some respects,[a] and they are often referred to as coverbs. There are also location markers, which are placed after nouns and are thus often called postpositions; they are often used in combination with coverbs. Predicate adjectives are normally used without a copular verb ("to be") and so can be regarded as a type of verb.
As in many other East Asian languages, classifiers (or measure words) are required when numerals (and sometimes other words, such as demonstratives) are used with nouns. There are many different classifiers in the language, and each countable noun generally has a particular classifier associated with it. Informally, however, it is often acceptable to use the general classifier gè (个; 個) in place of other specific classifiers.
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