The present paper discusses, from a viewpoint of functional grammar, especially based on the ”From Old to New Principle”, Chinese presentative sentences, which include existential sentences and meteorological sentences among others, in contrast with the corresponding English sentence patterns. The so-called ”From Old to New Principle” can be summarized as ”the sentence elements representing old and less important information are to be placed as near the sentence-initial position as possible while those representing new and more important informantion are to be placed as near the sentence-final position as possible”. This seemingly simple and direct principle, however, can be used to account for the differences in the functional perspectives of various sentence patterns in English as well as in Chinese, and thus provides a useful instrument not only to a contrastive analysis involving the two languages but also to teaching translation from one language to the other.
