(a) illustrates a complement small clause: it has no tense-marking, only a DP subject and an NP predicate. However, the semantic difference between Mandarin Chinese and English with regards to its small clauses are represented by example (b) and (c). Though (b) is the embedded small clause in the previous example, it cannot be a matrix clause. Despite having the same sentence structure, a small clause consisting of a DP and an NP, due to the ability of a nominal expression to also belong to a second category of verbs, example (c) is a grammatical sentence. This is evidence that there are more restrictive constraints on what is considered a small clause in Mandarin Chinese, which requires further research.