This paper examines the role of movable adverbs in Mandarin Chinese. In terms of their position within a sentence, most Mandarin adverbs can be classified as movable or non-movable. While identification of either class may be based on their semantic categories or on the number of syllables, the motivation for placing a movable adverb in front of the subject rather than in front of the predicate gives prominence to its conjunctive function in discourse. The paper claims that moving an adverb to the front of a clause is a process of grammaticalization. As clause connectives generally occur between clauses, a constituent that is placed in the pre-subject position is more likely to take on a conjunctive function than anything else in that clause or in a preceding clause. Evidence supporting this claim comes from the usage of pairs such as "ke" and "keshi," and "jiu" and "jiushi." Their cognitive and structural characteristics fit snugly into the resultant features of grammaticalization, namely overlapping, asymmetry, decategorization, recategorization, and grammaticalization chain. (Contains 11 references.) (MDM)