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7 - Derivational and Inflectional Affixes in Chinese and Their Morphosyntactic Properties

from Part Two - Morpho-lexical Issues in Chinese

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 August 2022

By
Dingxu Shi  and
Chu-Ren Huang
Edited by
Chu-Ren Huang ,
Yen-Hwei Lin ,
I-Hsuan Chen  and
Yu-Yin Hsu
Chu-Ren Huang
Affiliation:
The Hong Kong Polytechnic University
Yen-Hwei Lin
Affiliation:
Michigan State University
I-Hsuan Chen
Affiliation:
University of California, Berkeley
Yu-Yin Hsu
Affiliation:
The Hong Kong Polytechnic University
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Summary

The concepts being discussed in this chapter are bound morpheme, free morpheme, root, affix, semi-affix, inflection, derivation and their application in the analysis of Chinese word-formation process. The inflectional affixes include aspectual markers, plural marker, potential infixes as well as those involved in reduplication. Two major approached are presented in this chapter about the derivation of Chinese words. The essence of the morphological derivation approach is that most word-building blocks have equal status as free root and bound roots, except for affixes. Chinese words are formed with these roots according to morphological rules and the syntactic status of a word is determined by its head. The essence of the syntactic-semantic is that the majority of Chinese words are constructed according to syntactic rules in that the relationship between morphemes in a word could be described as conjunction, modification, subject-predicate, verb-object or verb-result. A few bound morphemes are treated as affixes since their semantic content has been bleached, and they form words with morphological rules.

Keywords

inflectionderivationmorphemeaffixword-formation
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Handbook of Chinese Linguistics , pp. 135 - 157
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

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