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3 - Wordhood and Disyllabicity in Chinese

from Part Two - Morpho-lexical Issues in Chinese

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 August 2022

By
James Myers
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

Words pose a theoretical challenge in Chinese, but words pose a challenge in any language. Even though Chinese is written with monosyllabic, monomorphemic characters and no overt word boundaries, there is as much evidence here as there is in English or any other language for a level between the morpheme and the phrase, interfacing between the lexicon and the grammar. Yet their interface role makes words dynamic things, subject to distinct and often conflicting constraints from processing, semantics, phonology, morphology, and syntax. To emphasize the universality of this situation, the chapter starts with a quick look at the dynamic nature of English words before turning to focus on Chinese words, which a wide variety of data reveal as surprisingly English-like, including a strong preference for disyllabicity. The chapter ends by sketching a formalism that may help capture the universal yet dynamic nature of wordhood, showing how it helps account for some of the Chinese facts.

Keywords

wordhooddisyllabicitypsycholinguisticscomputer modelinggrammatical analysis
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Handbook of Chinese Linguistics , pp. 47 - 73
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

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