While noun and verb are two separate syntactic classes in opposition to each other in Indo-European languages, in Chinese they are a pair of pragmatic classes (reference and predication), and not in opposition to each other. Chinese nouns constitute a super-noun category with verbs as its sub-category. In other words, all verbs in Chinese are actually verbal nouns. This characteristic feature of Chinese can be explicated from the perspectives of cognition, language typology, grammaticalization, philosophical background, and experimental studies of word classes.