The pattern “因为……所以” has been always regarded as the most popular and most typical causeeffect pattern of complex sentences in Chinese in varieties of textbooks, but this description doesn’t all agree with the practical case in people’s use of the language. In Chinese the frequency by which two subordinators occur in a causal complex sentence is very low. In contrast the pattern “……, 因为……”, which is often regarded as special and nontypical occurs more frequently than other patterns. The causal relation in language differs from that in logic, for the latter emphasizes the cause relation between things whereas the former doesn’t, but referring just to a causal relation by people’s subjective understanding. As a result, the pattern “……, 因为……”is taken just as a pragmatic pattern, but this “pragmatic word order” is being used more and more popularly, which indicates a tendency of “grammaticalization of pragmatic usage”.

causal complex sentence in Chinese; prominent word order; semantic relation; semantic expression