Abstract: As a new usage in modern and contemporary Chinese, the adverb-noun construction has caught much scholarly attention so far, whereas few researchers have focused on what kind of difficulties the emergence of the adverb-noun construction will bring to the theory of syntactic analysis. This paper takes the adverb-noun construction as an established linguistic fact and discussed the challenges it poses to different theoretical paradigms: for Chinese structuralism, adverb-noun construction makes the boundaries of parts of speech blurred again; for generative grammar, especially for the government and binding theory, the adverb-noun construction seems to violate the X-bar paradigm and the NP filter; and for constructional grammar, there is still some room for further exploration of the constructional meaning and the cognitive motivation of the formation of the adverb-noun construction. Based on these challenges, this paper attempts to provide solutions or directions for future research.