This is an investigation of deletion procedures from surface structure to deep structure in Mandarin Chinese. The author explains that the deep structure of a sentence provides complete information on the semantic and syntactic constituency of the sentence, while surface structure contains information about the phonological interpretation and phonetic actualization. The surface and deep structures are related by a sequence of syntactic rules; the author maintains that some constituencies have to be deleted from the deep structure in order to derive the surface structure in Mandarin. These deletions are the subject of the paper, and are also relevant to the general theory of language development. Here, a sector of Mandarin Chinese grammar is examined in order to determine what kinds of relationships exist between the deep and surface structures and how these relationships relate to language universals. The discussion is substantiated with extensive examples. (FB)