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Abstract Noncanonical word orders encode noncanonical patterns of information packaging in dis¬course. The Mandarin Chinese Locative-Verb-Subject (LVS) construction features the noncanonical word order with which it introduces the inversed subject as new information (Chen & Jing- Schmidt 2014; LaPolla 1995). Chen & Jing (2021) found that native speakers of Mandarin Chi¬nese were sensitive to the noncanonical word order of the Mandarin LVS construction, which they distinguished from other construction types. Based on the findings in Chen & Jing (2021), the current study conducted a grammatical perception experiment (Experiment 1) and a phonetic production experiment (Experiment 2) to further explore the referential status of the inversed subject NP. The results of Experiment 1 showed that LVS sentences with an indefinite subject re¬ceived significantly higher acceptability ratings than those with a definite subject. Experiment 2 compared acoustic measures of the O in SVO, the S in SVL and the S in LVS produced by the same group of Mandarin speakers. The results showed prosodic prominence of duration and pitch range in the subject of the LVS sentences, providing acoustic evidence of its noncanonical information status. The results of the two experiments in the current study support the findings in the corpus study in Chen & Jing (2021) and hold important methodological implications for em¬pirical research on construction grammar.
Key words: LVS construction; information status; indefinite referential; prosodic prominence
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