Research

Ohio State Dissertations in Linguistics (OSDL)

John Xiang-ling Dai (1993)

Chinese Morphology and its Interface with the Syntax

Advisor: Arnold Zwicky

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Abstract:

This work studies the word structure of Chinese to justify three distinctions and posit them as language universals: syntax vs. morpholgy, compounds vs. phrases, and derivational morphology vs. inflectional morphology. Chinese is chosen because linguistic tradition holds that the language has little morphology except for compounding, that the internal structure of its compounds is simply a reflection of its phrasal syntax, and that Chinese has not inflection. With universal notions developed for affixes, words, compounds, and clitics, an investigation of compounding, derivation, and inflection in Chinese is conducted. This study shows that principles governing word structure and phrase structure in Chinese are distinct with respect to alternative ordering of constituents, the ability to change lexical categories, reference of phonology, acceptance of optional dependents, suppression of constituents, and tolerance of exceptions to rules.

While the verb-object and subject-predicate "compounds" are shown to be noncompound words, some "NPs" are demonstrated to be compounds, on a par with the resultative compounds and coordinative compounds. A compound behaves differently from a phrase in that a compound may exhibit lexical, semantic, or phonological idiosyncrasies and its constituents observe lexical integrity. The measurative -ta, resultative -de, deservative -dou, and three aspect suffixes are argued to be inflectional morphemes, with -tou a morphosyntactically governed form similar to case marking in European languages. These inflections bear on several unsolved theoretical issues in Chinese syntax: (1) The verb inflected with -de is demonstrably the head of the resultative construction, prohibiting its subcategorized complement from cooccurring with an NP object. (2) Inflectional morphology does not support the Case account of word order in Chinese as it does in European languages, because NP--tou shows no morphological case alternations in different distributions; instead, the exceptional head-initial word order in Chinese correlates with a morphological head-marking pattern within verbal subcategorizations. (3) An inflectional truncation analysis of reduced A-not-A questions is shown to be superior to various reduplication analyses. (4) It is argued that the theory of Lexical Morphology cannot capture the derivational-inflectional distinctions in Chinese, since it unavoidably causes an ordering paradox.