The paper digs into the counter-expectation information structure (CEIS) of discourses in Mandarin Chinese, involving the relationships between the information units, the variant models, and their cognitive-pragmatic mechanisms. The linguistic data from corpus and the statistics on CNKI lead to the key findings. First off, “condition”, “expectation” and “counter-expectation” are the three main information units of the CEIS. The relationships between “conditions and expectations”, “expectations and counter-expectations”, and “conditions and counter-expectations” are “cause-and-effect and analogy”, “negation”, and “bridging” respectively, which abide by the principles of “proximity and similarity”, “prominence” and “closure” in Gestalt Principles. Second, with the aid of VOSviewer, we discovered that “condition + counter-expectation” and “independent counter-expectation” are the two most frequently used variant models of the CEIS. The default of expectations in these models is due to the collaboration of mechanisms like stereotypical relations, metonymy, quantity iconicity and language economy. Finally, the study briefly explores the online information processing of counter-expectation based on the governing principles of typology, integration and unpacking.