Wordhood and Disyllabicity in Chinese

James Myers

doi:10.1017/9781108329019.005

3 - Wordhood and Disyllabicity in Chinese

from Part Two - Morpho-lexical Issues in Chinese

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 August 2022

Edited by

I-Hsuan Chen and

Chu-Ren Huang: Affiliation:
The Hong Kong Polytechnic University
Yen-Hwei Lin: Affiliation:
Michigan State University
I-Hsuan Chen: Affiliation:
University of California, Berkeley
Yu-Yin Hsu: Affiliation:
The Hong Kong Polytechnic University

Book contents

Get access

Summary

Words pose a theoretical challenge in Chinese, but words pose a challenge in any language. Even though Chinese is written with monosyllabic, monomorphemic characters and no overt word boundaries, there is as much evidence here as there is in English or any other language for a level between the morpheme and the phrase, interfacing between the lexicon and the grammar. Yet their interface role makes words dynamic things, subject to distinct and often conflicting constraints from processing, semantics, phonology, morphology, and syntax. To emphasize the universality of this situation, the chapter starts with a quick look at the dynamic nature of English words before turning to focus on Chinese words, which a wide variety of data reveal as surprisingly English-like, including a strong preference for disyllabicity. The chapter ends by sketching a formalism that may help capture the universal yet dynamic nature of wordhood, showing how it helps account for some of the Chinese facts.

Keywords

wordhood disyllabicity psycholinguistics computer modeling grammatical analysis

Type: Chapter
Information: The Cambridge Handbook of Chinese Linguistics , pp. 47 - 73

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108329019.005 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2022

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Arnon, Inbal, and Snider, Neal. 2010. More than words: Frequency effects for multi-word phrases. Journal of Memory and Language 62(1):67–82.Google Scholar

Arppe, Antti, Hendrix, Peter, Milin, Petar, Baayen, R. Harald, Sering, Tino, and Shaoul, Cyrus. 2018. ndl: Naive discriminative learning. R package version 0.2.18. https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/ndl/index.html.Google Scholar

Baayen, R. Harald, Chuang, Yu-Ying, and Blevins, James P.. 2018. Inflectional morphology with linear mappings. The Mental Lexicon 13(2): 230–268.Google Scholar

Baayen, R. Harald, Hendrix, Peter, and Ramscar, Michael. 2013. Sidestepping the combinatorial explosion: An explanation of n-gram frequency effects based on naive discriminative learning. Language and Speech 56(3): 329–347.CrossRef Google Scholar PubMed

Baayen, R. Harald, and Ramscar, Michael. 2015. Abstraction, storage and naive discriminative learning. In Handbook of cognitive linguistics, ed. Dabrowska, Ewa and Divjak, Dagmar, 99–120. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.Google Scholar

Baayen, R. Harald, and Renouf, Antoinette. 1996. Chronicling the Times: Productive lexical innovations in an English newspaper. Language 72(1):69–96.Google Scholar

Baayen, R. Harald, Shaoul, Cyrus, Willits, Jon, and Ramscar, Michael. 2015. Comprehension without segmentation: A proof of concept with naive discriminative learning. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience 31(1):106–128.CrossRef Google Scholar

Bai, Xuejun, Yan, Guoli, Liversedge, Simon P., Zang, Chuanli, and Rayner, Keith. 2008. Reading spaced and unspaced Chinese text: Evidence from eye movements. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance 34(5):1277–1287.Google Scholar

Bauer, Laurie. 1983. English word-formation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar

Bicknell, Klinton and Levy, Roger. 2010. A rational model of eye movement control in reading. Proceedings of the 48th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Uppsala, 1168–1178.Google Scholar

Bloomfield, Leonard. 1926. A set of postulates for the science of language. Language 2(3):153–164.Google Scholar

Booij, Geert. 2012. Construction Morphology, a brief introduction. Morphology 22:343–346.Google Scholar

Bruening, Benjamin. 2018. The Lexicalist Hypothesis: Both wrong and superfluous. Language 94(1):1–42.Google Scholar

Chao, Yuen Ren. 1968. A grammar of spoken Chinese. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.Google Scholar

Chen, Zhong, Xu, Yuhang, and Xie, Zhiguo. 2020. Assessing introspective linguistic judgments quantitatively: The case of the syntax of Chinese. Journal of East Asian Linguistics 29:311–336.CrossRef Google Scholar

Chiu, Chenhao C. 2005. Phonological words in Mandarin speech production. Berkeley Linguistics Society: Proceedings of the 31st Annual Meeting 31(1):61–72.Google Scholar

Chomsky, Noam. 1970. Remarks on nominalization. Readings in English transformational grammar, ed. Jacobs, Roderick A. and Rosenbaum, Peter S., 11–61. Waltham, MA: Ginn and Co.Google Scholar

Daelemans, Walter, and van den Bosch, Antal. 2005. Memory-based language processing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar

DeFrancis, John. 1984. The Chinese language: Fact and fantasy. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press.Google Scholar

Dell, François. 2004. On recent claims about stress and tone in Beijing Mandarin. Cahiers de Linguistique Asie Orientale 33(1):33–63.Google Scholar

Ding, Nai Ding, Melloni, Lucia, Zhang, Hang, Tian, Xing, and Poeppel, David. 2016. Cortical tracking of hierarchical linguistic structures in connected speech. Nature Neuroscience 19(1):158–164.Google Scholar

Dong, Sicong, and Huang, Chu-Ren 董思聪, 黄居仁. 2019a. Clitic zhi (之) in Chongqing dialect and the classification of clitics 重庆方言的语缀”之”及语缀的分类问题. In Essays on Linguistics 59 语言学论丛第 59 辑. Beijing: Commercial Press.Google Scholar

Dong, Sicong and Huang, Chu-Ren 董思聪, 黄居仁. 2019b. The limits of language innovation in special linguistic zones 语言特区中创新形式的限度. TCSOL Studies 华文教学与研究 76(4):11–20.Google Scholar

Dong, Sicong, and Wong, Sam Yin. 2020. Haplology and lexical entries: A study based on cross-linguistic data from Sinitic languages. Lexicography 7(1):59–77.Google Scholar

Duanmu, San. 1998. Wordhood in Chinese. In New approaches to Chinese word formation: Morphology, phonology and the lexicon in Modern and Ancient Chinese, ed. Packard, Jerome L., 135–96. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar

Duanmu, San. 1999. Stress and the development of disyllabic words in Chinese. Diachronica 16:1–35.Google Scholar

Duanmu, San. 2012. Word-length preferences in Chinese: A corpus study. Journal of East Asian Linguistics 21(1):89–114.Google Scholar

Duanmu, San. 2017. Word and wordhood, modern. In Encyclopedia of Chinese language and linguistics, vol. IV, ed. Sybesma, Rint, 543–549. Leiden: Brill.Google Scholar

Duanmu, San. 2022. Evidence for stress and metrical structure in Chinese. In The Cambridge handbook of Chinese linguistics, ed. Huang, Chu-Ren, Lin, Yen-Hwei, Chen, I-Hsuan, and Hsu, Yu-Yin, 361–382. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar

Evert, Stefan, and Baroni, Marco. 2007. zipfR: Word frequency distributions in R. Proceedings of the 45th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Posters and Demonstrations Sessions, 29–32.Google Scholar

Feng, Shengli. 1998. Prosodic structure and compound words in Classical Chinese. In New approaches to Chinese word formation: Morphology, phonology and the lexicon in Modern and Ancient Chinese, ed. Packard, Jerome L., 197–260. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar

Garrett, Edward. 1999. Minimal words are not minimal feet. UCLA Working Papers in Linguistics 1 [Papers in Phonology 2]:68–105.Google Scholar

Geertzen, Jeroen, Blevins, James P., and Milin, Petar. 2016. The informativeness of linguistic unit boundaries. Italian Journal of Linguistics 28(1):25–48.Google Scholar

Gordon, Matthew. 2002. A factorial typology of quantity-insensitive stress. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 20(3):491–552.Google Scholar

Hagstrom, Paul. 2006. A-not-A questions. In The Blackwell companion to syntax, ed. Everaet, Martin and van Riemsdijk, Henk, 173–214. Malden, MA: Blackwell.Google Scholar

Harris, Zellig S. 1954. Distributional structure. Word 10:146–162.Google Scholar

Haspelmath, Martin. 2011. The indeterminacy of word segmentation and the nature of morphology and syntax. Folia Linguistica 45(1):31–80.Google Scholar

Hendrix, Peter, Bolger, Patrick, and Baayen, Harald. 2017. Distinct ERP signatures of word frequency, phrase frequency, and prototypicality in speech production. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 43(1):128–149.Google Scholar

Hoosain, Rumjahn. 1992. Psychological reality of the word in Chinese. Language processing in Chinese, ed. Chen, Hsuan-Chih and Tzeng, Ovid J. L., 111–130. Amsterdam: North-Holland.Google Scholar

Huang, Chu-Ren, Chen, Keh-jiann, Chen, Feng-yi, and Chang, Li-Li. 1997. Segmentation standard for Chinese natural language processing. Computational Linguistics and Chinese Language Processing 2(2):47–62.Google Scholar

Huang, Chu-Ren, Hsieh, Shu-Kai, and Chen, Keh-Jiann. 2017. Mandarin Chinese words and parts of speech: A corpus-based study. Abingdon: Routledge.Google Scholar

Huang, Chu-Ren, Wang, Hongjun, and Chen, I-Hsuan. 2022. Characters as basic lexical units and mono-syllabicity in Chinese. In The Cambridge handbook of Chinese linguistics, ed. Huang, Chu-Ren, Lin, Yen-Hwei, Chen, I-Hsuan, and Hsu, Yu-Yin, 74–97. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar

Huang, Chu‐Ren, and Xue, Nianwen. 2012. Words without boundaries: Computational approaches to Chinese word segmentation. Language and Linguistics Compass 6(8):494–505.Google Scholar

Huang, James C.-T. 1984. Phrase structure, lexical integrity, and Chinese compounds. Journal of the Chinese Language Teachers Association 19(2):53–78.Google Scholar

Huang, James C.-T. 1991. Modularity and Chinese A-not-A questions. In Interdisciplinary approaches to language: Essays in honor of Yuki Kuroda, ed. Georgopoulos, Carol and Ishihara, Roberta, 305–332. Dordrecht: Springer.Google Scholar

Huang, James C.-T., Li, Y.-H. Audrey, and Li, Yafei. 2009. The syntax of Chinese. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar

Inkelas, Sharon. 2008. The dual theory of reduplication. Linguistics 46:351–402.Google Scholar

Jackendoff, Ray and Audring, Jenny. 2016. Morphological schemas: Theoretical and psycholinguistic issues. The Mental Lexicon 11(3):467–493.CrossRef Google Scholar

Kirby, Simon. 2001. Spontaneous evolution of linguistic structure: An iterated learning model of the emergence of regularity and irregularity. IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation 5(2):102–110.Google Scholar

Kochanski, Greg, Shih, Chilin, and Jing, Hongyan. 2003. Quantitative measurement of prosodic strength in Mandarin. Speech Communication 41(4):625–645.Google Scholar

Lenzo, Kevin. 2014. The CMU pronouncing dictionary. www.speech.cs.cmu.edu/cgi-bin/cmudict.Google Scholar

Li, Meng-Feng, Gao, Xin-Yu, Chou, Tai-Li, and Wu, Jei-Tun. 2017. Neighborhood frequency effect in Chinese word recognition: Evidence from naming and lexical decision. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 46(1):227–245.Google Scholar

Li, Xingshan, Bicknell, Klinton, Liu, Pingping, Wei, Wei, and Rayner, Keith. 2014. Reading is fundamentally similar across disparate writing systems: A systematic characterization of how words and characters influence eye movements in Chinese reading. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 143(2):895–913.Google Scholar

Li, Yafei. 2005. X⁰: A theory of the morphology–syntax interface. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar

Li, Yafei. 2022. On an integral theory of word-formation in Chinese and beyond. In The Cambridge handbook of Chinese linguistics, ed. Huang, Chu-Ren, Lin, Yen-Hwei, Chen, I-Hsuan, and Hsu, Yu-Yin, 174–197. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar

Lin, Tzu-Jung, Anderson, Richard C., Ku, Yu-Min, Christianson, Kiel, and Packard, Jerome L.. 2011. Chinese children’s concept of word. Writing Systems Research 3(1):41–57.CrossRef Google Scholar

Liu, Fenghsi. 1998. A clitic analysis of locative particles. Journal of Chinese Linguistics 26 (1):48–70.Google Scholar

Liu, Li. 2015. Chinese quatra-syllabic schematic idioms: Description and acquisition. Dissertation, Hong Kong Institute of Education.Google Scholar

Marantz, Alec. 1997. No escape from syntax: Don’t try morphological analysis in the privacy of your own lexicon. University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics 4(2):201–225.Google Scholar

Marantz, Alec. 2013. No escape from morphemes in morphological processing. Language and Cognitive Processes 28(7):905–916.Google Scholar

Matthews, Peter. H. 1991. Morphology, 2nd ed. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar

Mok, Leh Woon. 2009. Word-superiority effect as a function of semantic transparency of Chinese bimorphemic compound words. Language and Cognitive Processes 24(7–8):1039–1081.Google Scholar

Monsell, Stephen. 1991. The nature and locus of word frequency effects in reading. In Basic processes in reading: Visual word recognition, ed. Besner, Derek and Humphreys, Glyn W., 148–197. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.Google Scholar

Müller, Stefan. 2018. The end of lexicalism as we know it? Language 94(1):e54–e66.Google Scholar

Myers, James. 2017. Morphological processing of compounds, behavioral studies. In Encyclopedia of Chinese language and linguistics, vol. III, ed. Sybesma, Rint, 94–100. Leiden: Brill.Google Scholar

Myers, James, Huang, Yu-chi, and Wang, Wenling. 2006. Frequency effects in the processing of Chinese inflection. Journal of Memory and Language 54(3):300–23.Google Scholar

Myers, James, and Tsay, Jane. 2015. Trochaic feet in spontaneous spoken Southern Min. In Proceedings of the 27th North American Conference on Chinese Linguistics, vol. 2, Los Angeles, 368–387.Google Scholar

Newmeyer, Frederick J. 2009. Current challenges to the lexicalist hypothesis: An overview and a critique. In Time and again: Theoretical perspectives on formal linguistics in honor of D. Terence Langendoen, ed. Lewis, William D., Simin Karimi, Heidi Harley, and Farrar, Scott O., 91–117. Amsterdam: Benjamins.Google Scholar

Packard, Jerome L. 1999. Lexical access in Chinese speech comprehension and production. Brain and Language 68(1):89–94.Google Scholar

Packard, Jerome L. 2000. The morphology of Chinese: A linguistic and cognitive approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar

Perry, Conrad, and Zhuang, Jie. 2005. Prosody and lemma selection. Memory and Cognition 33:862–70.Google Scholar

Pham, Hien, and Baayen, Harald. 2015. Vietnamese compounds show an anti-frequency effect in visual lexical decision. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience 30(9):1077–1095.Google Scholar

Qin, Zuxuan and Duanmu, San. 2017. A judgment study of word-length preferences in Chinese NN compounds. Lingua 198:1–21.Google Scholar

Qin, Zuxuan, and Duanmu, San. 2019. An acceptability judgment study of 1 + 1 NN compounds in Chinese. Lingua 222:26–38.Google Scholar

R Core Team. 2020. R: A language and environment for statistical computing. R Foundation for Statistical Computing, Vienna, Austria. https://cran.r-project.org/.Google Scholar

Ruan, Jia-Cing, Hsu, Chiung-Wen, Myers, James, and Tsay, Jane S.. 2012. Development and testing of transcription software for a Southern Min spoken corpus. International Journal of Computational Linguistics and Chinese Language Processing 17(1):1–26.Google Scholar

Shih, Shu-hao. 2017. Major phrases are binary: Evidence from Taiwan Mandarin flat structure. In Proceedings of the 34th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics, ed. Kaplan, Aaron, Kaplan, Abby, McCarvel, Miranda K., and Rubin, Edward J., 454–461. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Proceedings Project.Google Scholar

Spencer, Andrew. 1988. Bracketing paradoxes and the English lexicon. Language 64(4):663–682.Google Scholar

Taft, Marcus. 1979. Recognition of affixed words and the word frequency effect. Memory & Cognition 7:263–272.Google Scholar

Tsang, Yiu-Kei, Huang, Jian, Lui, Ming, Xue, Mingfeng, Chan, Yin-Wah Fiona, Wang, Suiping, and Chen, Hsuan-Chih. 2018. MELD-SCH: A megastudy of lexical decision in simplified Chinese. Behavior Research Methods 50(5):1763–1777.Google Scholar

Tseng, Chiu-yu, Pin, Shao-huang, Lee, Yehlin, Wang, Hsin-min, and Chen, Yong-cheng. 2005. Fluent speech prosody: Framework and modeling. Speech Communication 46:284–309.Google Scholar

Wang, Nan Mai, Wu, Che-Ming, and Kirk, Karen Iler. 2010. Lexical effects on spoken word recognition performance among Mandarin-speaking children with normal hearing and cochlear implants. International Journal of Pediatric Otorhinolaryngology 74(8):883–890.Google Scholar

Wang, Shichang, Huang, Chu-Ren, Yao, Yao, and Chan, Angel. 2017. Word intuition agreement among Chinese speakers: A Mechanical Turk-based study. Lingua Sinica 3(1):13.Google Scholar

Ward, Gregory, Sproat, Richard, and McKoon, Gail. 1991. A pragmatic analysis of so-called anaphoric islands. Language 67(3):439–474.Google Scholar

Wheeldon, Linda, and Lahiri, Aditi. 1997. Prosodic units in speech production. Journal of Memory and Language 37:356–381.Google Scholar

Xu, Zheng. 2018. The word status of Chinese adjective–noun combinations. Linguistics 56(1):207–56.Google Scholar

Yip, Po-Ching. 2000. The Chinese lexicon: A comprehensive survey. London: Routledge.Google Scholar

Yu, Miao, Yan, Han, and Yan, Guoli. 2018. Is the word the basic processing unit in Chinese sentence reading: An eye movement study. Lingua 205:29–39.Google Scholar

Zádrapa, Lukáš. 2017. Word and wordhood, premodern. In Encyclopedia of Chinese language and linguistics, vol. IV, ed. Sybesma, Rint, 549–554. Leiden: Brill.Google Scholar

Zhou, Xiaolin, and Marslen-Wilson, William. 1994. Words, morphemes and syllables in the Chinese mental lexicon. Language and Cognitive Processes 9(3):393–422.Google Scholar

Ziemski, Michał, Junczys-Dowmunt, Marcin, and Pouliquen, Bruno. 2016. The United Nations Parallel Corpus v 1.0. Language resources and evaluation. In Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, May 2016, Portorož, Slovenia, 3530–3534.Google Scholar

Zipf, George Kingsley. 1935. The psychobiology of language: An introduction to dynamic philology. Boston, MA: Houghton–Mifflin.Google Scholar

Zou, Lijuan, Packard, Jerome, Xia, Zhichao, Liu, Youyi, and Shu, Hua. 2019. Morphological and whole-word semantic processing are distinct: ERP evidence from spoken word recognition in Chinese. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 13:133.Google Scholar

Zwicky, Arnold M. 1985. Clitics and particles. Language 61(2):283–305.Google Scholar

Book contents

3 - Wordhood and Disyllabicity in Chinese

Summary

Keywords

Access options

References

Save book to Kindle

Save book to Dropbox

Save book to Google Drive