A Brief Analysis of Chinese Compound Features
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As Booij (2016) stated, morphology refers to the study of the “internal structure of words” and the rules by which words are formed (p. 7) 0. As a significant branch of morphology, English speakers are accustomed to composing a compound phrase with several single lexemes or free morphemes. As a ubiquitous linguistic phenomenon, compounds have become an indispensable component of language lexeme formation. Compounds, by definition, are “words that are composed of two (or more) bases, roots, or stems” (Lieber, 2010, p. 43). In Mandarin Chinese, almost all words can be considered as compounds. Xing (2006) remarked that approximately 80% of Chinese words are in fact compound words. There are some peripheral morphological phenomena in Germanic language such as English, which is just as prevalent in Chinese as the Sino-Tibetan language. According to the previous studies, the most obvious characteristics of Chinese compounds exhibit four common head morphologies: right-headed, left-headed, two-headed and headedness in “metacompounding”. The aim of the paper is to highlight the distinct feature of Chinese in morphology through introducing the linguistic concepts with regard to compound.
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References
- Bisetto, A. & Scalise, S. (2005). The classification of compounds. Lingue e Linguaggio. 4(2), 319-32. Ceccagno, A. & Basciano, B. (2007). Compound headedness in Chinese: An analysis of neologisms. Morphology. 17(2), 201-31. Greet Booij. (2016). The Grammar of Words: An Introduction to Linguistic Morphology. (3rd ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lieber, R. & Stekauer, P. (2009). The Oxford Handbook of Compounding. Oxford University Press, pp. 3- 18, 357-369, 478-491. Lieber, R. (2010). Introducing Morphology. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Sun, C. (2006). Chinese: A linguistic Introduction. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Xing, J. Z. (2006). Teaching and Learning Chinese As a Foreign language: A Pedagogical Grammar. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press.