What have we discovered about words?

In this work we have uncovered scores of generalizations that apply to Chinese words. A reasonable working hypothesis would be that some of these generalizations are also relevant to the formation and use of words in other languages. While it remains to be seen which of the generalizations will be found to apply universally, let us for now take a brief look at what Chinese has told us.

We discussed the fact that, from the perspective of Chinese, the concept of the word may not be as intuitive a notion as it is in other languages, for a number of reasons. After considering the various possible definitions of ‘word’, we found that there is a considerable degree of overlap among the criteria used to define the word, with the definition that offers the most convergence being that of the word as a minimal free syntactic atom.

A framework was offered that describes the internal characteristics of Chinese words by identifying the form classes of the word components. This was related to the fact that normally the word itself also has a form class identity, and that there exists an intimate relationship between the form class identity of the word and that of its constituents. We found that the form class identity of morphemes within words is largely word-driven, with the identity of the gestalt word playing a major role in determining constituent identity.