This chapter samples signs from educational institutions at various levels and a few school and government offices.

This chapter presents select signs that show several common stylistic traits of written Chinese. They include classical Chinese elements, mixed lexical compounds with both classical and non-classical components, and classical Chinese grammatical features. There are also many ‘out of vocabulary’ items not usually found in dictionaries. They include aliases for place names and the numerous ad hoc and fleeting abbreviations, whose interpretation crucially depends on background knowledge.

This chapter samples health-related signs, including several public service announcements from past pandemics, medicines, and various offices and departments in a neighborhood community clinic in Shanghai.

Chapter 2 is a survey of the definitions of CFs in main morphological accounts. CFs are then described as part of transitional morphology and compared with affixes and compound constituents.

Word formation in Germanic languages mainly takes place by means of compounding and affixation. Compounds are usually right-headed, and there is often a linking element in N+N-compounds that derives historically from a case ending. In addition to endocentric compounds there are also copulative compounds. Compounding also takes place with roots of Greek and Latin origin that do not occur as words by themselves. Some compound constituents have developed into affixoids. Affixation is used to derive words of major categories: nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs. Some of these affixes behave phonologically similar to compound constituents. Many nonnative affixes, identified on the basis of sets of borrowed nonnative complex words, are being used in word formation as well. Other mechanisms of word formation are affix substitution, conversion, reduplication, prosodic morphology, abbreviation, and blending. For the construction of numerals above 20, syntactic coordination may be used. The word formation patterns of Germanic languages have been strongly influenced by contact with Greek, Latin, and French. In addition, they have been influenced by contact with English. Individual languages have borrowed some of their morphology and complex words from another Germanic language, and Yiddish has been strongly influenced by various non-Germanic languages.

Cormac McCarthy is the foremost American novelist to have simultaneously inspired and crafted screenplays which are successful in their own right. Beginning with his early script for The Gardener’s Son (1977) and continuing through both the Coen brothers’ film adaptation of No Country for Old Men (2007) and his own screenplay for The Counselor (2013), McCarthy has emerged as a formidable figure on both the page and on screen. Yet the intriguing aspect of this dual career is how fully his cinematic efforts have altered the trajectory of his novelistic creations, with an early verbal style that culminated in the famously baroque Blood Meridian honed decades later into a more elliptical, streamlined novelistic strain. And this becomes most clearly apparent in reviewing the successes (and failures) involved in adapting McCarthy’s astringent novelistic vision for the cinema. The review of seven distinct original screenplays and adaptations suggests that the arc of McCarthy’s novels cannot be adequately understood independent of his strong, developing commitment to cinematic possibilities, which have progressively altered a vision initiated as exclusively verbal and become increasingly tempered by visual and filmic considerations.