The Head of the Chinese Adjectives and ABB Reduplication

This study investigates whether the head of the Chinese adjective compounds is on the left or right or on both sides. Sproat (1998), Starosta et al (1998), and Ceccagno, et al (2006, 2007) argue that the adjectives are right-headed, and Huang (1998) claims that Chinese adjectives are headless. Using the ABB type of adjectives as evidence, I argued that the head of the Chinese adjectives is more like on the left than on the right. This study supports the Headedness Principle and also calls into questions whether a suffix is the head of a word as traditionally assumed in morphology. On the other hand, it also provides evidence that reduplication is a compounding process as Haugen (2008) has claimed since most of the reduplicated constituents of ABB have a specific lexical meaning and many of them can be used as independent words.