A dictionary-based study of Chinese morphology

基于词典的汉语形态研究

6,000

In his famous book Language 1933, Bloomfield defines the morphology of a language as the constructions in which bound forms appear among the constituents. Bloomfield remarks that Chinese is an isolating language and uses no bound forms. For a long time, it has been commonly believed that Chinese is a morphologically impoverished language all over the world. By contrast, it has also been claimed that Chinese has many bound forms (Lü 1963, Packard 2000, Xu to appear). Hence, Chinese could be considered a morphologically rich language based on Bloomfield’s definition. However, there still remains a crucial question of what is the percentage of bound morphemes in Chinese. Answers to this question would shed light on the issue of whether Chinese is morphologically rich or not. Students will collect bound morphemes from a sample of the morpheme (character) entries listed in Xiandai Hanyu Cidian ‘Modern Chinese Dictionary’ and calculate their percentage.