Abstract This paper explores the relation between familiarity of Chinese subjects and the syntactic distance. We propose two hypotheses: (1) contextually given Mandarin Chinese subjects are more likely to be used with long intervening adverbials than contextually new subjects; and (2) subjects with higher word frequency are more likely to be followed by long adverbials than those with lower word frequency. The data from two Mandarin Chinese treebanks provide supportive evidence for the first hypothesis, but not the second. Cognitively, this is probably due to the possibility that contextual givenness, which reflects familiarity, may lessen the effect of locality by increasing the activation level (the accessibility) of the subject and rendering these subjects less susceptible to the memory decay caused by the adverbials intervening between them and the predicate verbs. Subjects are usually the starting point of a sentence, which has a default given–new information structure. Therefore, when organizing a sentence, we are dominantly concerned with the information status (contextual givenness) relative to previous context when choosing the subjects, which may partly accounts for the observed irrelevance between word frequency and the use of adverbials. A sentence is structured based on the information status of the subjects, not their word frequency.