The Handbook of Chinese Linguistics

C. T. James Huang, Y. H. Audrey Li, Andrew Simpson, C. T. James Huang, Y. H. Audrey Li, Andrew Simpson

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781119457077
  9780470655344
• eBook ISBN:
  9781118584545
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Langues et linguistique
• Subtopic: Langues

The Handbook of Chinese Linguistics is the first comprehensive introduction to Chinese linguistics from the perspective of modern theoretical and formal linguistics. Containing twenty-five chapters, the book offers a balanced, accessible and thoughtfully organized introduction to some of the most important results of research into Chinese linguistics carried out by theoretical linguists during the last thirty years. Presenting critical overviews of a wide range of major topics, it is the first to meet the great demand for an overview volume on core areas of Chinese linguistics.

Authoritative contributions describe and assess the major achievements and controversies of research undertaken in each area, and provide bibliographies for further reading. The contributors refer both to their own work in relevant fields, and objectively present a range of competitor theories and analyses, resulting in a volume that is fully comprehensive in its coverage of theoretical research into Chinese linguistics in recent years.

This unique Handbook is suitable both as a primary reader for structured, taught courses on Chinese linguistics at university level, and for individual study by graduates and other professional linguists.

Part I

Syntax, Semantics, and Morphology

1

Morphology

Wei-Wen Roger Liao

1 Introduction

This chapter provides an overview of morphological phenomena in Mandarin Chinese. Although Chinese is in the main an isolating language, with significantly less morphology than agglutinating and polysynthetic languages, a range of both inflectional and derivational affixes do occur and are productive, and will be discussed in Section 2. Like many other heavily isolating languages, Chinese exhibits great richness in the area of compounding, and much of the chapter focuses on this aspect of morphology in Chinese. Section 3 discusses general patterns found in nominal compounds and the controversial issue of the headedness of Chinese compounds. Section 4 takes the study of compounds further into the verbal domain and examines the status of a particularly challenging type of compound in Chinese, verb–object/VO compounds, which seem to behave both as morphological compounds and syntactic phrases, posing potential problems for their categorization as objects formed by morphological or syntactic rules. Before we proceed to consider these issues, certain standard morphological terminology made use of in the chapter will be noted. First, in terms of structural role, a morpheme (the smallest meaningful or grammatical unit participating in word formation operations) may be a stem (the base of which is called a root) or an affix (AFF). If a morpheme is able to stand alone as an independent word, it is termed a free morpheme; it is otherwise referred to as a bound morpheme. By such a definition, all affixes are necessarily bound, while roots may be either free or bound (simple examples of bound roots in Chinese would be ge- in ge-dan “pigeon-egg, pigeon egg” and er- in er-zi “son-Affix, son”). Affixes are further divided into two types, according to their morphological functions. Derivational affixes generally change the categories of the stems they attach to, while inflectional affixes contribute grammatical information and functions to the stems but do not affect the category of the stem (e.g., plural marking on nouns, tense affixation to verbs).

2 Affixes in Chinese

In its inventory of affixal elements, Chinese has been noted to exhibit both inflectional and derivational affixes, as broadly defined above (Dai 1992; Packard 2000).¹ In what follows in Sections 2.1–2.2, a sampling of representative affixes given in Chao (1968), Dai (1992), Li and Thompson (1981), and Packard (2000), is given, categorized here according to their categorial statuses (i.e., whether the inflectional affixes are attached to verbal or nominal stems, and whether the derivational affixes yield verbal or nominal stems). In Section 2.3, a controversial issue is discussed regarding the correct distinction of bound roots and derivational affixes in Chinese.

2.1 Inflectional affixes

2.1.1 Nominal inflectional affixes

Chinese nouns are in general rather “bare” because they are not inflected for grammatical gender, number, or person. The plural (PL) suffix -men, which is used with human nouns and pronouns in standard Mandarin, marks the only exception, as illustrated in (1):²

(1)	N[+human]-men “noun-Plural”
	ren-men “person-PL: people,” laoshi-men “teacher-PL: teachers,” nan-hai-men “male-child-PL: boys,” gong-ren-men “work-man-PL: workers,” wo/ni/ta-men “I/you/he-PL: we/you/they” (but not *niu-men “cow-PL” or *che-men “car-PL”).

Chao (1968) notes that certain classifiers can also be used as inflectional suffixes marking plurality and collectivity:

(2)	N+CL “noun-Collective”
	zhi-zhang “paper-CL: papers,” niu-zhi “cow-CL: a herd of cows,” ma-pi “horse-CL: a herd of horses,” hua-duo “flower-CL: flowers” (but not *ren-ge “person-CL” or *shou-zhi “hand-CL”).

2.1.2 Verbal inflectional affixes

Verbal inflections in Chinese are also relatively few. Verbs are only inflected with aspectual suffixes (Asp). In Mandarin, these aspectual suffixes include the Perfective -le, Experiential -guo, and Progressive/Durative -zhe, which combine with verbs in an extremely regular fashion (see Chapter 7 for further discussion). One less-mentioned aspectual suffix, which Chao (1968: 205) refers to as Tentative aspect (while Li and Thompson 1981 and Dai 1992 use the term Delimitative aspect), is in the form of reduplication (RED):

(3)	V-RED “V for a short while/a little”
	zou-zou “walk-walk: walk for a while,” xue-xue “learn-learn: learn a little/for a while,” kan-kan “see-see: watch for a while”

As Dai (1992) notes, when this rule is applied to disyllabic words, the whole stem must be reduplicated, as shown in (4b), which contrasts with unacceptable reduplication forms in (4c):

(4)	Verb reduplication rule for disyllabic stems
	a. [XY]V-RED → XY-XY, when the verbal stem is of the form XY
	b. [bang-zhu]-bang-zhu “help-help-RED: help a little,” [an-wei]-an-wei “peace-console-RED: console a little”ss
	c. *bang-bang-zhu, *bang-zhu-zhu, *bang-bang-zhu-zhu

We shall come back to reduplication in Section 3.2, where the reduplication rule will be shown to be useful for determining the “compound-hood” of Verb–Object compounds.

It can also be noted that adjectives in Chinese may undergo reduplication, and while verbal reduplications take the form XYXY, adjectival reduplications have the different form XXYY (Chao 1968; Li and Thompson 1981). For example, the word qingsong “relax/relaxed” can be used as a verb or as an adjective. The distinction is reflected through different reduplication patterns. Observe the following examples:

(5)	a. [qing-song]V-RED → qing-song-qing-song “to relax a little”	[XYXY]
	b. [qing-song]Adj-RED → qing-qing-song-song “quite relaxed”	[XXYY]

2.2 Derivational affixes

Derivational affixes generally display a range of character...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Blackwell Handbooks in Linguistics
• Title page
• Copyright page
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Notes on Contributors
• Foreword
• Part I: Syntax, Semantics, and Morphology
• Part II: Phonetics, Phonology, and Prosody
• Part III: Language Acquisition and Psycholinguistics
• Part IV: Historical Linguistics
• Part V: Morpho-Syntax of Other Non-Mandarin Varieties of Chinese
• Index