Morphology and Lexical Processing in Chinese:

Morphology and Lexical Processing in Chinese

1. Morphology

• 1.1. The branch of grammar that deals with the internal structure of words (Matthews, 1974, Morphology).
  
• 1.2. The structure of words and the system of rules for generating that structure (Selkirk, 1982, The Syntax of Words).

2. Morpheme

• 2.1. The minimal distinctive unit of grammar, and the central concern of morphology (Crystal, 1991, A Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics.)
• 2.2. Free vs. bound

3. Lexeme

• 3.1. The minimal distinctive unit in the semantic system of a language (Crystal, 1991).

4. The Identities of the Word (Packard, 2000)

• 4.1. Orthographic: Word defined by writing conventions.
• 4.2. Phonological: Word defined using phonological criteria.
• 4.3. Morphological: The output of a word formation rule.
• 4.4. Lexical: Listedness.
• 4.5. Syntactic: independent occupant of syntactic form class slot (X0).
• 4.6. Semantic: Word as concept.

5. Syntax and Lexicon

• 5.1. Inflection: Syntactically determined.
  (1) GENERATE: generate, generates, generating, generated
• 5.2. Derivation: Change of part of speech.
  (2) generation
• 5.3. Compounding: The derivation of a compound lexeme from two or more simpler lexemes.
  (3) bathroom, overdose, high school, nationwide, above-mentioned, overdo

6. Psycholinguistic Issues

• 6.1. Lexical level: Are morphologically complex words stored in the mental lexicon (as independent lexical entries)?
• 6.2. Orthographic/phonological level: Are morphologically complex words perceptually decomposed (parsed) during lexical access?
  • 6.2.1. Access units or orthographic redundancy?

7. Structural Transparency of Chinese Words

• 7.1. Monosyllabic morpheme.
• 7.2. No morphophonemic alternation.
  (4) sailed, fished, faded
• 7.3. No paradigmatic alternation.
  (5) SEA: sea, seas
  (6) MAN: man, men
• 7.4. No grammatical agreement phenomena.

8. Unique Characteristics of Chinese Words

• 8.1. Chinese has very few grammatical and word-forming affixes.
  (7) le (了); zhe (著); guo (過); men (們)
  (8) zi (子); tou (頭); xing (性); hua (化); xue (學); jia (家)
• 8.2. The majority of morphologically complex words are composed of two words, a word plus a bound root, or two bound roots. These words are usually called compounds by many Chinese linguists. However, compound in this context, deviates from its definition: A compound lexeme is derived from two or more simpler lexemes.
  (9) bingshan (冰山); yuanze (原則); siwang (死亡); xiangpi (橡皮)

9. The "Compounds" in Chinese

• 9.1. Distribution of word structures (Huang, 1997).
• 9.2. The Verb-Object (V-O) compounds have both word and phrasal structure.
• 9.3. Headed? 89.9% of all nouns have a noun on the right, and 85% of all verbs have a verb on the left. Shuanfan Huang says no because the word head is not in a constant position. Jerry Packard says yes because different form class identities can have different head positions.
• 9.4. Semantic transparency.
  (10) Derivation: authority vs. friendly; disclose vs. dislike
  (11) [NN]N: flour mill vs. windmill
  (12) [NN]N: tianshu (田鼠) vs. hema (河馬)

10. Processing Non-compounds

• 10.1. Historical background: Liang (1992), Chen (1993), and Tsai (1994; Exp. 1-3).
• 10.2. Monomorphemic two-syllable words.
  (13) luoji (邏輯); mada (馬達); paidui (派對)
  (14) pusa (菩薩); putao (葡萄); luobo (蘿蔔)
• 10.3. Tsai (1994; Exp. 4).
  (15) kaobei (拷貝); mangbao (盲胞); juanzong (卷宗); jinsheng (晉升)

11. Processing Compounds: Psycholinguistic Issues

• 11.1. V-O compounds, resultative verbs, and the interface (and interaction) between morphology and syntax.
• 11.2. Productivity of morphological rules.
• 11.3. Violation of the headedness principle.
• 11.4. Semantic transparency.
• 11.5. Lexical parsing.

References

Chen, S.-T. (1993). Hanyu gouci zai yuedu licheng zhong dui yuyi cufa xiaoying de yingxiang [Effects of Chinese morphology on semantic priming during reading]. Unpublished master's thesis, National Chung-Cheng University, Chia-Yi, Taiwan.

Crystal, D. (1991). A dictionary of linguistics and phonetics (3rd. Ed.). Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishers.

Huang, S. (1997). Chinese as a headless language in compounding morphology. In J. Packard (Ed.), New approaches to Chinese word formation: Morphology, phonology and the lexicon in modern and ancient Chinese (pp. 261-283). Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter.

Liang, M.-Y. (1992). Recognition processing in reading compositional and idiomatic words. Unpublished master's thesis, National Tsing-Hua Univerisity, Hsin-Chu, Taiwan.

Matthews, P. H. (1991). Morphology (2nd. Ed.). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Packard, J. L. (2000). The morphology of Chinese. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Selkirk, E. O. (1982). The syntax of words. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Tsai, C.-H. (1994). Effects of semantic transparency on the recognition of Chinese two-character words: Evidence for a dual-process model. Unpublished master's thesis, National Chung-Cheng University, Chia-Yi, Taiwan.