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Article published In:
International Journal of Chinese Linguistics
Vol. 5:1 (2018) ► pp.94–124

The morphology of Chinese disyllabic verbs

| Beloit College

With a close examination of the characteristics of Chinese monosyllables, i.e., the base morphemes that form the disyllabic verbs, this article discusses the morphological traits these characteristics bring to disyllabic compound verbs. The two distinctive characteristics of the Chinese monosyllables, namely, being morphologically independent and highly polysemous, give rise to unusual phenomena in disyllabic verbs, most representatively the headedness of coordinative compound verbs. The Chinese language not only has various possible forms of headedness, but also allows the same compound verbs to be both endocentric and exocentric.

Keywords: monosyllable, disyllabic compound, content/function morpheme, polysemous, denotation, endocentric/exocentric head
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Characteristics of monosyllables
    • 2.1 Zì: The unique triad
    • 2.2 Zì as lexeme
    • 2.3 Zì as morpheme
    • 2.4Roots and (bound) roots
  • 3.Disyllabic verbs
    • 3.1Classification
    • 3.2Variant approach
  • 4.Disyllabic compound verbs
    • 4.1Coordinative compounds
    • 4.2Non-coordinative compounds
    • 4.3Modifier-head compounds
  • 5.Headedness of disyllabic compound verbs
    • 5.1Semantic criterion
    • 5.2Varieties of head types
    • 5.3Coexistence of endocentric and exocentric heads
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • Abbreviations
  • References
Published online: 10 August 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ijchl.16020.yon
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