Morphology

Choosing between Long and Short Word Forms in Mandarin

“…Affixes are bound and functional morphemes (Liao, 2014), denoted by 0 in what follows; they are members of a closed set (Wang et al, 2015), for instance, 老 in 老虎(lao-hu, tiger), 头 in 骨 头(gu-tou, bone), etc. Pseudo-affixes are very similar to affixes, but they are not a member of the closed set; they are free morphemes that can be used separately (i.e., as a separate word) but also as part of a multi-syllabic word, in which case they lose their original meaning.…”

The concept of Family in Mandarin Chinese – A Cognitive Linguistic Approach to the Comprehension of Chinese Jia

“…Given the typological differences between Mandarin Chinese and Indo-European languages, a compound in Chinese can be broadly defined as a word consisting of "at least two morphemes neither of which is an affix" (Norman 1988: 156), so each Chinese compound is a di-or multi-syllabic word constituted by two or more Chinese characters. Actually, compounding operations in modern Mandarin Chinese allow two non-affixal, bound morphemes, two free morphemes or a combination of a bound morpheme and a free morpheme to form disyllabic compounds (Sun 2006), and Chinese compounds can be classified into subject-predicate compounds, coordinative compounds, modifier-head compounds, verb-object compounds and verb-resultative compounds based on the syntactic and semantic relationships between compound components (Liao 2014). The analysis of compounding in a language involves discussions about the issue of headedness in compounds, and the head of a compound refers to the compound component that projects its categorical identity and has the semantic dominance of the whole compound, so a compound with a head is known as an endocentric compound while a compound without a head is an exocentric compound (Liao 2014).…”

“…Actually, compounding operations in modern Mandarin Chinese allow two non-affixal, bound morphemes, two free morphemes or a combination of a bound morpheme and a free morpheme to form disyllabic compounds (Sun 2006), and Chinese compounds can be classified into subject-predicate compounds, coordinative compounds, modifier-head compounds, verb-object compounds and verb-resultative compounds based on the syntactic and semantic relationships between compound components (Liao 2014). The analysis of compounding in a language involves discussions about the issue of headedness in compounds, and the head of a compound refers to the compound component that projects its categorical identity and has the semantic dominance of the whole compound, so a compound with a head is known as an endocentric compound while a compound without a head is an exocentric compound (Liao 2014). Compared with English compounds largely following the right-headed rule (Lieber 1992), Chinese compounds do not show their heads so straightforwardly, and scholars are divided in their views about the controversial issue of headedness in Chinese due to the complexity and variety of Chinese compounds (Ceccagno and Basciano 2007;Liao 2014).…”

“…The analysis of compounding in a language involves discussions about the issue of headedness in compounds, and the head of a compound refers to the compound component that projects its categorical identity and has the semantic dominance of the whole compound, so a compound with a head is known as an endocentric compound while a compound without a head is an exocentric compound (Liao 2014). Compared with English compounds largely following the right-headed rule (Lieber 1992), Chinese compounds do not show their heads so straightforwardly, and scholars are divided in their views about the controversial issue of headedness in Chinese due to the complexity and variety of Chinese compounds (Ceccagno and Basciano 2007;Liao 2014). Huang (1998) claims that Chinese compounds are headless without being governed by the headedness rules, as it is impossible to generalize which compound constituent can function as a head in a Chinese compound, and neither the right-headed rule nor the left-headed rule seems to enjoy a privilege status in disyllabic Chinese compounds, while Starosta et al (1998) argue that Chinese compounds all follow the right-headed rule which is more visible in multisyllabic compounds.…”

A Study on Prefix of Hohhot Dialect

“…LITERATURE REVIEW Liao (2014) believes that "if a bound morpheme carries no substantive meaning, and / or its position is fixed, it is best analyzed as an affix. Otherwise, it should be categorized as a bound root".…”