The Inside Word Structures of Modern Standard Chinese

Abstract

The topic of the paper is to describe the inside word structures of Modern Standard Chinese. In the five parts of the paper, five groups of words are discussed: monomorphemic words, reduplications, affix formations, semanteme formations with the internal syntactic structure, and synthetic formations. Analyzed vocabulary consists of polysyllabic words, including those with the status of compound words.

In the first part of the article, the monomorphemic polysyllabic words are presented with a brief reference to the monomorphemic monosyllabic words. The second part describes the structure of words with the reduplication and their particular type—broken reduplication. In the third part, the affix formations are presented, including words containing proper affixes and quasi-affixes. The semanteme formations with subject-predicative, coordinative, determinative, rective and complementive structures, as well as the multisemanteme words containing stacked syntactic structures are discussed in the fourth section. Various types of synthetic formations, i.e. words formed by the combination of different types of the inside word structures, are presented in the fifth section.