This course examines the grammar of modern Chinese, particularly spoken Chinese, from functional, cognitive, and cross-linguistic comparative perspectives, aiming to help students understand how grammar evolves from and is shaped by language use. Discussions will center on the analysis of a series of interrelated phenomena frequent in spontaneous speech, such as duplication/iteration and post-posing of sentence constituents as well as truncation of sentences, through which students will be guided to learn how to discover grammatical regularities in spoken Chinese.