Current Research on Chinese Morphology

Dear Colleagues,

We are pleased to invite submissions for a Special Issue in Languages on “Current Research on Chinese Morphology”.

This proposed Special Issue of Languages invites papers from researchers who are interested in Chinese morphology. We encourage research on Chinese morphology from diverse subfields of language sciences, including Chinese linguistics, psycholinguistics, language acquisition, as well as theoretical, functional, corpus, and computational linguistics. Papers can be empirical or theoretical in nature and may address any question related to the typological features of Chinese morphology, interfaces between Chinese morphology, phonology syntax, semantics, and pragmatics, first and second language acquisition of Chinese morphology, processing of Chinese morphology, and language change and evolution. 

Chinese offers an interesting case for the crosslinguistic study of linguistic morphology. It is known as a morphologically impoverished language with no grammatical agreement and little morphophonemic and paradigmatic alternation, or inflection (e.g., Li and Thompson, 1981), but it has a range of inflectional and derivational affixes and morphological processes that are productive, and compounding constitutes a particularly productive and crucial area of Chinese morphology and grammar (e.g., Liao, 2018; Packard, 2000). A substantial amount of work on Chinese morphology has focused on: (i) the linguistic analyses of the formation, structure, and classification of different types of compounds in Chinese (Huang et al., 2018; Packard, 1998b); (ii) fundamental theoretical issues in morphology, such as the definition, distinction, and diagnosis of wordhood versus morphemes (bound and free) and phrases from phonological, morphological, and syntactic perspectives; the nature of morphemes (e.g., Dai, 1998; Duanmu, 1998); and head direction or headedness of compounds (e.g., Huang, 1998; Starosta et al., 1998); and (iii) argument structure of complex predicates such as resultative verb compounds (e.g., Chang, 1998; Duanmu, 1998), and verb–object compounds (e.g., Liao, 2018; Ross, 1998). Some studies have also examined word formation historically, e.g., word formation in classical Chinese (e.g., Baxter and Sagart, 1998; Feng, 1998), diachronic evolution and motivation of disyllabic words as a result of prosodic factors and changes in phonological shapes (e.g., tones, segments), and meaning as morphemes combine to form words (Feng, 2002, 2018).

Recent studies of Chinese morphology have extended the theoretical analyses to the linguistic and cognitive nature of Chinese words (Packard, 1998a; Packard, 2000) and the data-driven empirical approaches to the production and comprehension of Chinese words, e.g., lexical features of spoken Chinese in particular registers (conversational Chinese in Tao, 2015 and academic Chinese in Tao, 2021) and acquisition of verb compounds in production and comprehension (Chen, 2006, 2008, 2017). Many theoretical issues, however, remain to be empirically explored to enhance our understanding of the nature of the mental lexicon, the morphological rules and constraints on word formation, and the production, comprehension, and acquisition of such mental knowledge in naturalistic real-time language use in Chinese. For example, what is the psycholinguistic evidence for the mental reality of morphemes and morphological processes and rules in Chinese? How are words stored in the mental lexicon in Chinese? How are words retrieved, recognized, accessed, or produced when speaking, hearing, and reading in Chinese? What is the role of frequency of language use in cognitive processing of the Chinese lexicon? How does mental lexical and morphological knowledge of Chinese develop in typical and atypical child and second language learners of Chinese? How do Chinese words evolve and come into being or out of existence via lexicalization, abbreviation borrowing, or grammaticalization? How are new words created to fill the lexical gaps?

The aim of this Special Issue is to bring together cutting-edge research investigating Chinese morphology from diverse theoretical and empirical perspectives and shed light on the nature of the universal and language-specific properties of words and morphology in natural language, mental knowledge and psycholinguistic processes of word composition, formation, internal structure, morphological rules, and their development crosslinguistically.

We request that, prior to submitting a manuscript, interested authors initially submit a proposed title and an abstract of 400–600 words summarizing their intended contribution. Please send the abstract to the Guest Editor Dr. Jidong Chen ([email protected]) or to the Languages editorial office ([email protected]). Abstracts will be reviewed by the guest editors for the purposes of ensuring proper fit within the scope of the Special Issue. All papers will undergo peer review and will be published immediately upon acceptance.

The tentative completion schedule is as follows:

• Abstract submission deadline: 22 October 2021
• Notification of abstract acceptance: 31 October 2021
• Full manuscript deadline: 1 April 2022

References:

Baxter, William H. and Laurent Sagart. 1998. New approaches to Chinese word formation. In New approaches to Chinese word formation, Edited by Jerome L. Packard. Berlin: De Gruyter, pp. 35–76.

Chang, Claire Hsun-huei. 1998. V-V compounds in Mandarin Chinese: Argument structure and semantics. In New approaches to Chinese word formation, Edited by Jerome L. Packard. Berlin: De Gruyter, pp. 77–102

Chen, Jidong. 2006. The acquisition of verb compounding in Mandarin. In Constructions in acquisition, Edited by E. V. Clark & B. F. Kelly. Stanford: CSLI, pp. 111–136

Chen, Jidong. 2008. The acquisition of verb compounding in Mandarin [Unpublished doctoral dissertation, The Max-Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics & Free University of Amsterdam]. Nijmegen & Amsterdam, the NL.

Chen, Jidong. 2017. When transparency doesn’t mean ease: Learning the meaning of resultative verb compounds in Mandarin Chinese. Journal of Child Language, 44(3), 695–718. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0305000916000192

Dai, John Xiang-Ling. 1998. Syntactic, phonological, and morphological words in Chinese. In New approaches to Chinese word formation, Edited by Jerome L. Packard. Berlin: De Gruyter, pp. 103–134

Duanmu, San. 1998. Wordhood in Chinese. In New approaches to Chinese word formation, Edited by Jerome L. Packard. Berlin: De Gruyter, pp. 135–196

Feng, Shengli. 1998. Prosodic structure and compound words in classical Chinese. In New approaches to Chinese word formation, Edited by Jerome L. Packard. Berlin: De Gruyter, pp. 197–260

Feng, Shengli. 2002. Prosodic syntax and morphology in Chinese. Munich: Lincom Europa.

Feng, Shengli. 2018. Prosodic morphology in Mandarin Chinese. Oxfordshire: Routledge.

Huang, C.-T. James, Y.-H. Audrey Li and Andrew Simpson. 2018. The handbook of Chinese linguistics. Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons.

Huang, Shuanfan. 1998. Chinese as a headless language in compounding morphology. In New approaches to Chinese word formation, Edited by Jerome L. Packard. Berlin: De Gruyter, pp. 261–284

Li, Charles N. and Sandra Thompson. 1981. Mandarin Chinese: A functional reference grammar. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Liao, Wei-Wen Roger. 2018. Morphology. In The handbook of Chinese linguistics, Edited by Huang, C.-T. James, Y.-H. Audrey Li and Andrew Simpson. Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons. pp. 3–25

Packard, Jerome L.. 1998. A lexical phonology of Mandarin Chinese. In New approaches to Chinese word formation, Edited by Jerome L. Packard. Berlin: De Gruyter, pp. 311–328

Packard, Jerome L.. 1998.  New approaches to Chinese word formation. De Gruyter.

Packard, Jerome L.. 2000. The morphology of Chinese: A linguistic and cognitive approach. Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press.

Ross, Claudia. 1998. Cognate objects and the realization of thematic structure in Mandarin Chinese. In New approaches to Chinese word formation, Edited by Jerome L. Packard. Berlin: De Gruyter, pp. 329–346

Starosta, Stanley, Koenraad Kuiper, Siew-ai Ng and Zhi-qian Wu. 1998.  On defining the Chinese compound word: Headness in Chinese compounding and Chinese VR compounds. In New approaches to Chinese word formation, Edited by Jerome L. Packard. Berlin: De Gruyter, pp. 347–370

Hongyin, Tao. 2015. Profiling the Mandarin spoken vocabulary based on corpora. In Oxford handbook of Chinese linguistics, Edited by William Wang & Chaofen Sun. Oxford. Oxford University Press. pp. 336–347

Hongyin, Tao. 2021. Some lexical features of spoken academic Chinese and their pedagogical implications. Chinese Language Learning and Technology 1, 1–30. 

Prof. Dr. Jidong Chen
Prof. Dr. Hongyin Tao
Guest Editors

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• Chinese morphology
• inflectional
• derivational
• compounding
• mental lexicon
• lexicalization