Abstract

Based on The Core Wordlist of Contemporary Chinese for Information Process-ing（the Wordlist, thereafter），the establishment of which was initiated by Prof.Sun Maosong in 2002，some important issues regarding Chinese morphology are examined and discussed in the present research.

The internalized lexical competence can be divided into two parts：lexicon, which encompasses lexical units that have unpredictable idiosyncratic meanings；and morphology, which concerns how words are created.The dilemmas confront-ed in the previous studies on the judgement of“wordhood”of Chinese forms can be largely attributed to the unawareness of the relationship between lexicon and morphology.Many studies, either inadvertently or on purpose, defined words on-ly from the perspective of lexicon, paying too much attention to the containing limit of lexicon in word judgement, and denying word membership to some forms generated by productive morphological processes.In fact, the lexicon of a lan-guage is limited to some degree, while morphological productivity can be unlimit-ed, thus the number of possible words in a language can also be unlimited.Forms generated by morphological rules are all words though it is unnecessary and impossible to list all of them in the lexicon.Focusing on the differences and inter-actions between lexicon and morphology, we explore some poorly understood is-sues in Chinese morphology based on the data drawn from the Wordlist.

Apart from the introduction and conclusion, there are six chapters in this book.

Chapter 1 deals with some related theoretical issues.It reviews some previ-ous studies of lexicon and morphology, and then states briefly our point of view.

Chapter 2 argues that the basic unit of Chinese morphology is morpheme.There is no sharp distinction between root morphemes and affixes in Chinese.Both derivation and inflection are peripheral in Chinese morphology, whereas compounding is predominant.Compounding rules should be given top priority in the study of Chinese morphology.

Chapter 3 is concerned with the classification of Chinese morphemes.There is a special kind of nominal or verbal morphemes that are situated between free morpheme and bound morpheme.These morphemes are generally bound, but un-der specific circumstances they look more like free morphemes.They can occupy a syntactic slot as a word only when combined with some monosyllabic word.We call this kind of morphemes“semi-free morphemes”.Some monosyllabic adjecti-

val or adverbial morphemes also exhibit such semi-freedom, which is reflected in the fact that they are only half-productive when combined with nouns or verbs, and that they only select monosyllabic head to modify.Similarly, there are some functional morphemes that are situated between being functional word and being affix.We regard them as semi-free functional morphemes.These facts prompted us to classify Chinese morphemes into three kinds：free morphemes, semi-free morphemes, and bound morphemes.The existence of semi-free morphemes is the result of historical change, and it indicates that syntax and morphology in Chinese are closely interrelated.

Chapter 4 analyzes some productive morphological rules in Chinese.It ex-plores the criteria to evaluate morphological productivity and illustrates some pro-ductive morphological rules in Chinese.We investigate in our large corpus all the attested forms generated by the said productive rules.Among the forms generated by the same rule, it is often the case that some are included in published Chinese dictionaries, but some others are not.Here we see the interrelation between lexi-con and morphology.Morphological rules can provide members to the lexicon, but lexicon is only a subset of acceptable words in the language.When a form is generated by a productive morphological rule, whether it can be included in a dictionary or not is determined by semantic idiosyncracy, frequency, as well as some other pragmatic factors.

Chapter 5 discusses the prototypical formal and semantic structures of Chi-nese compounds.For nominal compounds，“noun+noun”is the predominant kind of formal structure；“indexing feature+thing type”is the typical semantic structure.For verbal compounds，“verb+verb”is dominant in formal represen-tation, and“manner or cause+action or result”is the typical semantic forma-tion.

Chapter 6 discusses another source of new words—lexicalization.We ana-lyze the motivations and mechanisms of some ongoing lexicalization processes, which give rise to some new words that are not yet commonly recognized by the editors of dictionaries.With its diachronic nature, lexicalization is different from morphological rules in how they produce new words.However, repeatedly occur-ring types of lexicalization might cause the formation of some syntactic structures to turn into morphological rules.

Key Words：morphology, lexicon, morpheme, compounding, morphologi-cal rules, lexicalization