Chinese morphology

Chinese is a morphologically rich language because it is full of bound forms. A distinction is made between morphology and word formation or lexeme formation. Though Chinese has only a few inflectional affixes, it is rich in derivational morphology and rife with special clitics and reduplications. Morphological phenomena such as productivity, blocking, and allomorph selection are all observed in Chinese affixal derivation. It is necessary to distinguish bound root words from true compounds with regard to, for example, naming functions and (non-)canonical wordhood. There are potentially many affixoids in Chinese, which blur the boundary between affixal derivation and bound root words. There are many special clitics in Chinese, including sentence-final particles, locative particles, and the prenominal morpheme 的de. They are phrasal affixes and their linear positions are better accounted for in morphology. 的de is a morphomic clitic, which explains why no (fully satisfactory) unified syntactic account of its properties has been made for a long time. No matter what theory is used to account for Chinese reduplication, it has to be taken into consideration that a Chinese reduplicated form is derived from its base or that there is a morphological (and semantic) relation between a base and its reduplicated form. Chinese reduplication generally involves a reduplicant that cannot occur alone and has to be dependent on its base.

There are two predominant arguments for the view that Chinese is a morphologically impoverished language. First, Chinese is an isolating language. Second, there is a relation between the indeterminacy of lexical categories and morphological impoverishment. Neither of them is correct.