Morpheme and word ··································································

A morpheme is the smallest meaningful unit in a language, while a word is the smallest meaningful unit that can be used freely in a language. One major source of confusion for students of Chinese is the overlap between words and morphemes. In English, morphemes usually cannot stand alone. They have no meaning unless they are attached to a word. For example, “un” has no meaning until it is attached to a word such as “comfortable” to form “uncomfortable”, at which point it takes of the meaning of “not”. In Chinese, by contrast, most morphemes are also words that can either stand alone or be combined with others, and which can therefore function either as words or as morphemes. This is especially the case in classical Chinese, since most words are monosyllabic, meaning that one character normally represents a word. In modern Chinese, however, most of the words are polysyllabic, with the majority being bisyllabic. Hence, a character can be a part of either a morpheme or a word. One example is the word 蜘蛛 zhīzhū (spider), in which the character 蜘 itself has no meaning, and only comes to mean “spider” when combined with 蛛. A lot of translated words belong to this category, such as 可卡因 kěkǎyīn (cocaine) or 沙发 shā fā (sofa). Scholars separate morphemes into free morphemes and bound morphemes according to “their propensity to combine with other morphemes” (Norman; 2006: 154). Actually a morpheme may be free in one context and bound in another context, such as 狗 (gǒu), which when used alone as a free morpheme means “dog”, but which can also be used as a bound morpheme in words such as 狗熊（gǒuxióng） (black bear) and 母狗（mǔgǒu）(bitch).

Another confusion caused by Chinese morphemes is that they “are strung together one after another without any indication of word boundaries” (Norman; 2006: 155), a fact which causes confusion even for Chinese people. (I was once surprised by glancing at these five adjacent characters “先进性教育”in a newspaper. There are two ways to separate this phase: one is “先进性”(advancement) “教育”(education), or “先

进”(advanced) “性教育”(sex education). I needed to read through the whole sentence to find the right place to separate the words.)

Words in Chinese were often divided into monosyllabic, disyllabic and multisyllabic words. Monosyllabic words dominated in classical Chinese while disyllabic words dominate in modern Chinese. Statistics show that among 8000 high-frequency words in modern Chinese, 71% of them are disyllabic, 26% are monosyllabic, and the 3% of multisyllabic words are basically trans-pronunciation. However, in spoken Chinese, monosyllabic words amount to 61%, while the disyllabic words are used at a frequency of 37%. (Lu; 2005: 7) Most disyllabic words are compound words. There are three important ways to form words in Chinese. The first way is to double the morphemes, such as in bàba (father, papa) or māma (mum). The second way is to add

word-formative suffixes or prefixes. Two common noun suffixes of this type are –zi and –r. Lǎo- is an example of a common prefix. The third way, known as

“word-compound”, is the preferred way to form words. Examples of words formed using the “word-compound method include “bàitáng”(white sugar), formed by combining bài (white) and táng (sugar) and xuéxí (study), formed by combining xué (study) and xí (practice). (Lu; 2005: 7) This method of compounding words causes a confusion of word and word phrase. Since both the “bái” and “táng" components of “báitáng” can be used as free words, from the point of view of word structure,

“báitáng” is like a word phrase. However, when considered from the point of view of the meaning of the concept and how closely the two components of the word are bound together, báitáng as a whole can also be treated as a word.

As mentioned above, most words in classical Chinese are monosyllabic, while most modern Chinese words are polysyllabic. Therefore, many words in classical Chinese have come to serve as morphemes in modern Chinese. For example, the character 桌 zhuō (table, desk) can be used freely by itself in classical Chinese, but in modern Chinese only with the addition of the suffix 子 zi can the two characters 桌子 be used to refer to a table. Even though modern written Chinese has now been in use for many

years, the conciseness and the beauty of classical Chinese is still very attractive for many Chinese people. According to Feng Shengli (2010), contemporary written Chinese must “alternate between classic/formal expressions and oral/informal

expressions”. He chose a short paragraph to show the proportion of classical Chinese (the highlighted sections) and modern Chinese in normal written Chinese (Example 2.3):

Example 2.3

According to statistics on standard written Chinese articles collected by Professor Feng, around 40% of words used in modern written Chinese are classical in origin. In modern written Chinese, moreover, there are many monosyllabic words with disyllabic

requirement. These “monosyllabic words are used productively, yet they are constrained prosodically. That is, they cannot stand-alone and must be used with another monosyllabic word to form a disyllabic PrWd (Prosodic Word, 韵律词). The Prosodic requirement demands that the words combined with the following

monosyllabic words cannot be disyllabic, even if the disyllabic words are synonyms of the monosyllabic ones used to form a PrWd.”(Feng) One example of this rule is the word 爱 (lovable, adorable, beloved) which can be used with other words to form words such as 爱妻 (beloved wife), 爱车(lovable car), 爱子( beloved son) in spite of the fact that in modern Chinese wife is 妻子, car is 车子, and son is 儿子. Although modern Chinese forms these three words by adding the suffix “子” behind the

classical Chinese words “妻” “车”“儿”，because of the rule cited about one cannot say 爱的妻子，爱的车子，or 爱的儿子. Feng’s research on PrWd also challenged the definition of “word”as being a freely used unit of language. The many complexities of Chinese make the separation of morphemes and words more difficult and will affect the arrangement of dictionary articles.