Chinese exhibits 'disharmonic' word order in the sense that heads, at least on the surface, do not uniformly precede their complements. In the current generative literature, there are diametrically opposed views on its overall clausal organisation: one view holds that the 'disharmony' is real, whereas the other view holds that disharmony is an illusion resulting from displacement, such that Chinese clausal structure is underlyingly harmonic. This project re-examines the controversy under the novel perspective of Cantonese dislocation, which can be classified into gapped dislocation, dislocation copying and the hitherto understudied imperfect dislocation. Based on the broadened empirical landscape, this project aims to (i) fo1mulate a more general theory of dislocation; and (ii) explore the implications of the proposed theo1y for a variety of unsettled issues including the clause structure of Chinese, which ultimately info1ms the extent to which basic word order may vary across natural languages.
