An applicative construction is defined as the encoding of a thematically peripheral argument or an oblique into an object nuclear argument. Until today, the term "applicative" is practically absent from almost all Chinese grammars. In this paper, we propose to apply this notion of applicative to Mandarin Chinese to account for the unusual phenomenon that many Chinese scholars called "prepositions postposed to verbs". In fact, most prepositions, which are derived from verbs by grammaticalization, appear in Standard Mandarin before the verbs they modify. The special case of other "oblique objects" is also discussed. We finally try to show that there is a special typological characteristic of the applicative voice in an analytic language like Mandarin: its morphology goes from derivational to compositional.