Chinese: A Language of Compound Words?

In this paper we shall address the issue of the massive creation of complex words in Mandarin Chinese, a phenomenon which has led many linguists to regard Modern Chinese as a “language of compound words”. The issue of the massive creation of compound words in Chinese is parallel to another issue, that of the process of disyllabification of the preferred word-form in the historical development of the language. The development of the typical word-form from monosyllabic to disyllabic has in many cases led to incorrect judgments about the compound status of many newly created words. In what follows, we shall first seek a working definition of compound and make some remarks about the concepts of ‘morpheme’ and ‘word’, and we shall see how these notions may be applied to the Chinese language (sections 2 and 3); we shall then address the issue of ‘compounding’ in Chinese from a synchronic point of view, clarifying what kind of complex word forms may be regarded as compounds (section 4). We shall then turn to diachronic issues, and we shall review some of the literature on the evolution of the Chinese word-form (among others, Feng, 2001 and Shi, 2002), from which we may draw a brief sketch of the developmental processes at issue here (section 5). We shall first review the common explanations which one can find in the literature for the development of complex word creation, and then we shall review the phonological/prosodic reason for disyllabification in the Chinese language, which provided the conditions for a number of changes, among which is the increase of compound words, drawing mainly upon analyses by Feng (2001) and Shi (2002), and we shall argue that the basic phonological unit in Modern Chinese is made up of two syllables (a foot, in Feng’s terminology; section 6). We shall then introduce our hypothesis, namely that the creation of a large number of compounded words was caused by the interplay of a number of factors, which include the above mentioned phonological simplification and the fact that in the Chinese lexicon there are almost no elements which can act as word boundaries, that is, fusive and/or agglutinative inflectional markers; moreover, the abundance of lexical morphemes, endowed with a stable relationship between phonological and orthographic form, is also supposed to be a facilitating factor in complex word production. We shall compare the Chinese data with some examples of multi-word expressions from the Romance languages, a family where the phenomenon of compounding is not as widespread as in Chinese; our hypothesis is that the different development in the domain of word formation between these two languages / language groups is motivated by the tendency to analyticity in the expression of coordination and subordination relationships both in syntax and in word formation (section 7). Lastly, we shall put forward the hypothesis that the extent to which a language is analytic or synthetic in word formation might have consequences on the development of compounding / complex word creation (section 8).