There are three key terms in the discussions of this book: grammatical interaction, lexical-functional grammar, and VO construction. The first is the overall approach for interpreting the grammatical analyses, the second is the formal syntactic model within which grammatical analyses are rendered, and the third is the general scope of Chinese data examined, with some reference to English. The interactionist approach finds its origin in Prof. William Wang’s inspirational lexical diffusion hypothesis. Prof. Hsin-I Hsieh extended the concept of ‘competition’ in lexical diffusion to the entire grammar, diachrony and synchrony, and made explicit what competition is in the general taxonomy of interaction types. I had the good fortune to be among those with whom he most generously shared his thinking on this exciting idea from the beginning and throughout its development.

　　I acquired the knowledge on the lexical functional theory while I was working on English-Chinese machine translation at ECS, Inc. in Utah. I am indebted to my then colleagues Dr. Dan Higginbotham and Dr. Joseph Pentheroudakis, indeed two of the most brilliant linguists I have known, for showing me how to look at a formal theory and formalism critically and make them computationally more efficient without relaxing their formal power. I also acknowledge Prof. Chu-Ren Huang’s pioneering and continuous works on Chinese within the lexical theory, even though our analyses do not always agree.