Summer School in Languages and Linguistics 2018

Leiden University, 9-20 July 2018

Chinese morphology
汉语的构词法
Giorgio F. ARCODIA Bianca BASCIANO
(马振国) (白夏侬)
University of Milano-Bicocca Ca’ Foscari University of Venice
Outline of the course

1 The typology of Chinese. Morphemes, roots, words. BB

2 Compounding – I BB
3 Compounding - II BB
4 Compounding - III GFA

5 Derivation BB
6 Reduplication in Chinese (and beyond) BB
7 Word formation in Old and Middle Chinese GFA
8 The Chinese lexicon - historical strata in the Chinese lexicon. BB
Neologisms and ‘buzzwords’. Lexical differences among dialects.
9 Grammaticalization in Chinese and Mainland Southeastasian GFA
Languages
10 Morphologization in Chinese dialects GFA
Compounding

 “There are probably no languages without either compounding, affixing or

both. In other words, there are probably no purely isolating languages.
There are a considerable number of languages without inflection, perhaps
none without compounding and derivation.”
(Greenberg, J., Some universals of grammar with particular reference to the order of
meaningful elements. In Universals of Language, Greenberg, J. (ed.), Cambridge, Mass.: MIT
Press, 93, 1963)

 “Compounds are important objects of morphological investigations,

because compounds are present in all languages of the world (as far as
described in grammars). Thus compounding is the widest-spread
morphological tecnique.”
(Dressler, W., Compound types. In The Representation and Processing of Compound Words, Gary Libben,
and Gonia Jarema (eds.), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 23, 2006)
 Compounding is the most widespread morphological process in Chinese.
According to statistics in Xing (2006:117), about 80% of Mandarin words
are compounds.
 Chinese as a language of compound words.
“ If one has to name only one morphological process in Mardarin, it will be,
without any question, compounding. Indeed, it would not be an
exaggeration to say that Mandarin is a language of compound words.
Just as the great majority of the words in Mandarin are of two syllable,
virtually all Mandarin compounds, with a relatively small number of
exceptions, are disyllabic. “
(Lin, Hua, A Grammar of Mandarin Chinese, Munich, Lincom Europa, p. 62, 2001)

“Compounding is the most productive means of word formation in Chinese. In

fact, it has been shown that compound words are over 70% of all words used
in Chinese (Institute of Language Teaching and Research, cited in Zhou et al.
1999), or even 80% (Xing 2006). In Chinese compounding seems to be the
rule in the formation of new words. This emerges clearly from the corpus of
neologisms developed over the last thirty years analysed in this article. In the
corpus, proposed by The Contemporary Chinese Dictionary (2002), out of
709 new words (those with no more than two syllables) almost 95% (672) are
compounds [...]“
(Ceccagno, A., Basciano, B., Compound headedness in Chinese: an analysis of neologisms,
Morphology, 17:2, 208, 2007)
What is a compound?

 Intuitive notion (zebra fish, tree house, apple pie) but difficult to define.
Many different definitions.

Bloomfield (1933), Marchand (1969), Bauer (1988), Anderson

(1992) and Fabb (1998): combination of two or more words.
Katamba (1993: 54): word that contains at least two bases, which
are both words, or at any rate, root morphemes.
Olsen (2000): two free forms or stems, which form a new complex
word.
Lieber (2004): combination of two stems.
Bauer (2001): “Compound is a lexical unit made up of two or more
elements, each of which can function as a lexeme independent of
the other(s) in other contexts, and which shows some phonological
and/or grammatical isolation from normal syntactic usage” (p. 695).
 Bauer (2006: 719): “[…]the forms in which the individual subwords appear
may be differently defined in different languages: a citation form in one, a
stem in another, a specific compounding form in yet a third, a word form in
a fourth.”
 Compound may contain more than two elements → e.g. in English
compounding is recursive:
Junior high school teachers association

 Compounds may be formed by bound roots: morphology.

 Compounds may contain inflected forms: parks commissioner

 Compound may contain a phrasal element (phrasal compounds; see e.g.

Plag 2003, Lieber and Scalise 2006): pipe-and-slipper husband

 Plag (2003): a compound is a word consisting of two elements

 first one: a root (either free or bound), word or phrase
 second one: root or word
What is a compound in Chinese?

 Given the centrality of the character and the correspondence between

character, morpheme and word, traditionally any word composed with
more than one character considered as compound (see Chao 1968: 359).
 This definition, however, includes words that cannot be as compounds.

 Word formed with affixes, e.g. 子 -zi and 儿 -r :

桃儿 táor ‘peach’ (2 characters)
桌子 zhuōzi ‘tavolo’ (2 characters)

 Polysyllabic morphemes:
葡萄 pútáo ‘grape’
玻璃 bōli ‘glass’
 In Chinese two terms to indicate complex words:
 合成词 héchéng-cí ‘compose/synthetize-word’
 复合词 fùhé-cí ‘compound/complex-word’.

 The Contemporary Chinese Dictionary (2002):

 复合词 fùhécí: see 合成词 héchéngcí, defined as:
“Compound word; word composed of two or more base morphemes.
Compound words fall into two categories:

a) words composed of two or more roots, such as 朋友 péngyou, 庆祝

qìngzhù, 火车 huǒchē, 立正 lìzhèng, 照相机 zhàoxiàngjī, 人行道 rénxíngdào;

b) words composed of roots and affixes, such as 桌子 zhuōzi, 瘦子

shòuzi, 花儿 huār, 木头 mùtou, 甜头 tiántou and 阿姨 āyí.
The former are called compounds, the latter are called derivates.”
 Thus, 合成词 héchéngcí includes both compounding and derived words →
COMPLEX WORD
合成词 héchéngcí = ‘complex word’
复合词 fùhécí = ‘compound word’
 Chao (1968: 359): “A compound is a combination of two or more words
bound together to form one word [...] Instead of requiring the
constituents of a compound to be free words, we shall take
compounds in a wide sense so as to include those in which the parts
are bound morphemes other than affixes.”

 Li & Thompson (1981): “[..] we may consider as compounds all

polysyllabic units that have certain properties of single words and that can
be analysed into two or more meaningful elements, or morphemes,
even if these morphemes cannot occur independently in modern
Mandarin.”
 Dai (1992): compounds = only words formed by free forms (productive
pattern). Word formed by at least one bound root would be stored in the
lexicon, not true compounds.

水鸟 shuǐ-niǎo ‘water-bird, acquatic bird’ = compound

笔友 bǐ-yǒu ‘pen-friend, pen pal’
(友 yǒu ‘friend’ = bound root, cf. 朋友 péngyou ‘friend’)
 Packard (2000):
compounds = word formed by free roots (root words):
冰山 bīng-shān ‘ice-mountain, iceberg’
马路 mǎ-lù ‘horse-road, road’

bound root words (word formed by bound roots):

电脑 diàn-nǎo ‘electricity-brain, computer’
橡皮 xiàng-pí ‘oak-skin, eraser’
 But bound roots are active in Chinese morphology: in word formation
processes they act in the same way as free roots. In addition, no formal
distinction between the two types.

 Sproat & Shih (1996): the word/non word distinction in Chinese is too
simplistic → “there is a gradation of 'wordiness': some morphemes occur
freely as words in Mandarin, others are always bound, and still others may
be free in some constructions (or styles) but not in others. ”

 Bound roots as constituents of compounds  affixes

 All roots are productively used in compounding.

 Dong X. (2004): compounds formed by bound roots (词根符合 cígēn fùhé)
= most typical word formation pattern in Chinese.
 Thus, there seems to be no particular reason for regarding compounds
formed by free roots/words and compounds formed by bound roots as
fundamentally different, especially if we admit that compound
constituents can have different shapes in different languages in
relation to the morphological profile of the language at issue (see e.g.
Bauer 2006:719, Lieber and Štekauer 2009:4-8, Scalise and Vogel
2010:5-6).
 Chinese compound = tipically, a complex word formed by two or more
roots (either free or bound).
 But we can also find other kinds of formatives in compound words.

 One of the constituents in a compound may be a (non-root) word, e.g.

狮子头 shīzi-tóu ‘lion-head, large stewed pork meatballs’: where 狮子
shīzi ‘lion’ is a word formed by a root plus the empty suffix 子-zi

 Compounds with a phrasal constituent as a modifier, e.g.

盗窃国宝犯 (He 2004: 2-3)
dàoqiè guó-bǎo fàn
steal national-treasure criminal
‘thief of state treasures’
→ Phrasal constituent + bound root.

 Generally speaking, though, Chinese compounds are formed by roots.

Compounds vs. phrases

 Distinction between compounds and phrases: notoriously thorny issue.

 Many morphosyntatic, semantic and phonological criteria have been
proposed: e.g. lexical integrity, conjunction reduction, freedom of parts,
semantic composition, syllable count, exocentricity, productivity, etc.
see Chao 1968, Huang1984, Duanmu 1998.).
 One particular debated case = verb-object constructions.
 Criteria proposed: lexicalized or specialized meaning, inseparability of
the construction, boundedness of one of the constituents, exocentricity,
ability to take an object. However, none of these criteria seems to be
sufficient to prove wordhood.
 E.g. 担心 dān-xīn ‘carry-heart, worry’: lexicalized, non-compositional
meaning and may be followed by an object. Compound?

我很担心这件事儿
wǒ hěn dān-xīn zhè jiàn shìr
I very carry-heart this CLF matter
‘I am very worried about this matter.’
 But it is separable. Phrase?

他担了三年的心
tā dān-le sān nián de xīn
he carry-PFV three year DET heart
‘He worried for three years.’
你担什么心?
nǐ dān shénme xīn
you carry what heart
‘What are you worrying about?’

 Dai (1992:81-82): a verb-object construction like 担心 dān-xīn is a phrase,

but can be reanalyzed as a word.
Classification of compounds

 Mandarin compounds can be classified according to different criteria,

considering different kinds of relations between the constituents (for an
overview, see Packard 2000).
 One widely adopted classification of compounds in Chinese linguistics
considers the surface syntactic relation between the constituents (see
e.g. Chao 1968):
 a. Subject-predicate compounds, e.g. 头疼 tóu-téng ‘head-ache, (have
a) headache’.
 b. Coordinate compounds, e.g. 书包 shū-bào ‘book-newspaper, books
and newspapers’.
 c. Subordinative compounds, in which there is a modifier-head relation, as
e.g. 牛肉 niú-ròu ‘cow-meat, beef’.
 d. Verb-object compounds, as e.g. 动身dòng-shēn ‘move-body, leave on a
journey’, 司机 sī-jī ‘manage-machine, driver’.
 e. Verb-complement compounds, as e.g. 改良 gǎi-liáng ‘change-good,
improve’, including resultative compounds, as e.g. 踢破 tī-pò ‘kick-break,
break by kicking’.
 More recently, some authors proposed other types of V-V compounds (for
an overview, see Steffen Chung 2006), as the following (see Hong 2004,
Chen 2007, Yi 2007):
 a. Serial verb type (连动型 liándòngxíng) compounds, in which there is
a relation of sequentiality between the two constituents of the
compound, as e.g. 拆洗 chāi-xǐ ‘take.apart-wash, take apart and
clean’.
 b. Double complement type (兼语型 jiānyǔxíng) compounds, where
normally the object of V1 is the subject of V2, as e.g. 劝退 quàn-tuì
‘advise-quit, persuade somebody to quit’
 According to Hong (2004), both types can be considered as serial verb
type compounds.
 Ceccagno and Scalise (2006) highlight the shortcomings of the different
kinds of classification proposed and stress the fact that the whole set of
categorial, functional and semantic levels should be taken into
account for an exhaustive analysis of compounds.

 Ceccagno and Basciano (2007) propose a classification of Chinese

compounds based on that put forth by Bisetto and Scalise (2005), who
identify three macro-types on the base of the relation between the
constituents, i.e. subordinate, attributive, coordinate.
 Compounds that are usually treated as subordinative (or modifier-head
compounds) are split into two groups: subordinate and attributive.
 Subordinate compounds: those characterized by a relation of
complementation between the constituents:

 Those with a deverbal head constituent, as e.g. Eng. Truck driver; Ch.
毒贩 dú-fàn ‘drug-vendor, drug trafficker’: the right-hand constituent
can be analyzed as a deverbal head, while the left-hand constituent
acts as an argument of the head;
 Also NN compounds where the constituents are typically linked by
what may be called an ‘of-relation’, as in table leg (‘leg of the table’),
Ch. 鸡毛 jī-máo ‘chicken-feather, chicken feather’

 Verb-object and verb-complement compounds also belong to this

group.
 Attributive compounds: relation of attribution. The prototypical case
involves compounds in which the modifier is an adjective, as in high
school, but other structural types are found too, as e.g. [N+N] compounds,
in which the non-head is used as a metaphoric attribute of the head, as in
swordfish (‘fish with a sword-like snout’).
 This type of compounds includes many of the compounds which are
generally termed root compounds in the literature (see Lieber 2009).
Head constituents can possibly belong to any lexical category, as e.g.
Eng. snow-white.

 Chinese attributives:

 a) the non-head is an adjective or a noun which expresses a property

of the head: e.g. 红木 hóng-mù ‘red-tree, mahogany’; 斑马 bān-mǎ
‘stripe-horse, zebra’;
 b) the non-head constituent acts as an adjunct modifying the head: e.g.
口算 kŏu-suàn ‘mouth-calculate, do a sum orally’;
 c) a verbal non-head acts as a modifier of the head, as e.g. 飞机 fēi-jī
‘fly-machine, airplane’.
 Coordinate compounds: those in which the constituents are in a logical
coordination, or are synonyms or antonyms.

 新锐 xīn-ruì ‘new-sharp, new and sharp’

 教导 jiào-dǎo ‘teach-guide, teach and guide’
 姐妹 jiě-mèi ‘older sister-little sister, sisters’
 胜绩 shèng-jì ‘victory-achievement, win/victory’
 呼吸 hū-xī ‘exhale-inhale, breath’

 Chinese lacks coordinate compounds of the kind of artist-designer,where

the two constituents refer to a single referent. According to Arcodia, Grandi
& Wälchli (2010), in Chinese a construction like 学生工人 xuésheng
gōngrén ‘student worker’ is normally interpreted as ‘student(s) and
worker(s)’.
 ‘Scalar co-compounds’ (Wälchli 2005), i.e. compounds which have as
referent some scalar property, e.g. height, weight, etc., where the two
constituents are adjectives which represent the extreme poles of the scale:
 大小 dà-xiǎo ‘big-small = seize’
 长短 cháng-duǎn ‘long-short = length’
 快慢 kuài-màn ‘fast-slow = speed’
 Each macro-type may be endocentric or exocentric.
Compound
Headedness Example
type

Endocentric 鸡毛 jī-máo ‘chicken-feather, chicken feather’

Subordinate
Exocentric 镇纸 zhèn-zhǐ ‘press-paper, paperweight’

Endocentric 斑马鱼 bānmǎ-yú ‘zebra-fish, zebrafish’

Attributive
Exocentric 花心 huā-xīn ‘false-heart, unfaithful’

Endocentric 酸辣 suān-là ‘hot-sour, hot and sour’

Coordinate
Exocentric 长短 cháng-duǎn ‘long-short, length’
 Compounds which are superficially alike may be characterized by different
relations between the constituents and difference in headedness:
 V+N
 飞机 fēi-jī ‘fly-machine, airplane’ (attributive, right-headed)
 管家 guǎn-jiā ‘manage-home, housekeeper’, (subordinate, exocentric)
 动手 dòngshǒu ‘move-hand, start an action’ (subordinate, left-headed)
Bound roots constituents and word class
identity
 While in many languages inflectional (and derivational) morphology may
be used to distinguish word classes on the basis of the shape of the word,
this is obviously not possible in Chinese, a language in which words and
roots have no category-specific morphology or phonological features
(Basciano 2017).

 The word class of a free item is identified mostly on the basis of syntactic
distribution.

 But some words are normally used e.g. both as verbs and noun, e.g.
工作 gōngzuò ‘to work; job/work’, 画 huà ‘draw/paint; picture’. Different
views: they belong to more than one lexical category (see e.g. Lü and
Zhu 2005 [1951]:10, Guo 2002b); they different words expressing
different meanings (Zhu 1982, Lu 1994), possibly related by means of
conversion/zero derivation (Tai 1997, Steffen Chung 2014).
 If the word class of a free item is identified mostly on the basis of syntactic
distribution, then what about bound roots, which do not normally appear in
isolation in a sentence and thus do not occupy a syntactic slot?
 It can only be said that semantically these roots are ‘noun-like’, ‘verb-like’,
‘adjective-like’, etc. However, the semantic criterion clearly proves to be
inadequate to distinguish word classes, as has been shown in the relevant
literature.
 E.g., Dixon (2004) observes that even though kinship terms like
‘mother’ or ‘father’ are nouns in most languages, they are verbs in
some languages, e.g. ‘be the mother of’.
 Very similar words from the point of view of meaning can have a
different syntactic behaviour. E.g. Ch. 突然 tūrán and 忽然 hūrán: they
both mean ‘suddenly’, however while 突然 tūrán may act both as a
predicative adjective and as an adverb, 忽然 hūrán can only be an
adverb
 Another possibility: these bound roots appearing in compounding can be
considered as the truncated forms of complex words and be assigned to
the word class of the corresponding free form (word).

 画册 huà-cè ‘picture-book, picture album’, analyzed by Packard (2000) as

a NN compound.
 冊 cè ‘book’ is a bound root, thus cannot be assigned to a syntactic
word class; therefore either the word class is assigned on a semantic
basis, or we could make reference to the word 冊子cèzi ‘booklet’.

 躺椅 tǎng-yī ‘recline-chair, reclining chair’.

 椅 yī stays for 椅子 yīzi ‘chair’ → N

 桌布 zhuō-bù ‘table-cloth, tablecloth’

 桌 zhuō is assigned the lexical category of 桌子 zhuōzi ‘table → N
 However, one can say that, basically, part-of speech identity is not relevant
for bound roots and that in Chinese compounding, root meanings rather
than word classes are crucial.

 Thus, we might question the necessity of word class assignment all along.