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In the Chinese language, morphologically complex words have been attested since the remote past of the language, including both stem-modifying processes and agglutination of morphemes, mostly lexical and free in the classical language (see Baxter & Sagart 1998). Chinese word-formation has received much attention in the literature in recent times, but most descriptions and theoretical work on the topicare focussed on compounding (see e.g. Packard 1998, 2000, Lin 2001, Ceccagno & Basciano 2009a-b), and it is still a matter of debate whether compounding and derivation are two distinct phenomena in Modern Mandarin Chinese (see, among others, Pan, Ye & Han 2004).
In this monograph we intend to analyse Chinese word formation patterns which may be candidate to derivational status, according to the definition of such process of word formation which we find in the morphological literature (as e.g. Beard 1998, Naumann & Vogel 2000, Olsen 2000): they are patterns such as X—學 ‘the study of X’ (心理學xinlixue ‘psychology’) or X—性 'the property of (being) X’( 重要性 zhongyaoxing ‘importance’). The characteristics of the morphemes around which those patterns are built which sets them close to derivational affixes are that they appear in a fixed position, seem to form new words productively and convey a different, “emptier” meaning than that of the corresponding lexical morph (see Ma 1995). The apparent phonological (and, needless to say, orthographical) identity between a “would-be affix” and its lexical counterpart (as, say, 學 used as a verb, ‘to study’) is not surprising, since grammaticalization without alteration in the sound shape of a morph is a characteristic feature of languages belonging to the East and South-East Asian area (Bisang 1996, 2004). Therefore, the notion of “affixoid”, coined to describe word formation elements in European languages which are bound but phonologically identical to a free form in the language (such as Dutch boer, meaning ‘farmer’ as a word and ‘dealer’ when used as a bound form), proves to be unnecessary for Chinese.
作者簡介
馬振國
Giorgio Francesco Arcodia has a Ph.D. in linguistics from Pavia University in Italy. During his PhD studies, he spent one year at the People’s University of China, Beijing (中國人民大學) and later conducted research at the National Taiwan University, Taipei (國立台灣大學). He currently teaches General Linguistics and Language Typology at the University of Milan-Bicocca, Italy. His main research interests are the morphology of Mandarin Chinese and Chinese dialects, grammaticalization in East and South-East Asian languages, Japanese linguistics, language typology and the acquisition of Italian as a foreign language.
CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION: THE CHINESE LANGUAGE,DERIVATION AND GRAMMATICALIZATION THEORY
1.1 ON THE SUBJECT OF OUR STUDY: MANDARIN CHINESE
1.2 DERIVATION IN WORD FORMATION
1.3 DERIVATION AND GRAMMATICALIZATION
CHAPTER 2 PREVIOUS TREATMENTS OF LEXICAL DERIVATION IN CHINESE LINGUISTICS
2.1 SOME KEY NOTIONS OF MORPHOLOGY IN CHINESE
2.2 LEXICAL DERIVATION IN CHINESE LINGUISTICS
CHAPTER 3 DERIVATION OR COMPOUNDING? THE MANDARIN CASE
3.1 THE BOUNDARY BEYWEEN DERIVATION AND COMPOUNDING IN MODERN MANDARIN CHINESE
3.2 ANALYSIS OF THE SAMPLE
3.3 SUMMARY AND CONCLUDING REMARKS
CHAPTER 4 CONCLUSION
4.1 LEXICAL DERIVATION IN GRAMMATICALIZATION THEORY
4.2‘INNER’AND ‘I OUTER’ FORCES DRIVING THE EVOLUTION OF CHINESE WORD FORMATION
4.3 LEXICAL DERIVATION AS A CROSS-LINGUISTICALLY VALID
CATEGORY
4.4 SUGGESTED AREAS FOR FURTHER RESEARCH
