Chinese Morphology is the study of words and word-making. Its goal is to understand the meaning in the relationships between words and the ways in which they are expressed, including how grammatical relationships are marked in different languages. For example, plurality is explicitly marked by an -s on English nouns, e.g., book as a singular noun and books as a plural noun. Furthermore, the relationships between words may require some morphological changes in different parts of a sentence. For instance, the verb form varies depending on the person and number of the subject noun phrase in an English sentence such as This book is very interesting vs. These books are very interesting in which the subjects and verbs have an agreement relationship, i.e., a third person singular, subjective noun corresponds to the copular verb is and a third person plural subjective noun to a different copular verb are.
Cross-linguistically, the minimal unit of meaning is commonly called a morpheme, and it is subdivided into two major types, bound and free. Bound morphemes primarily refer to affixes such as the English plural marker –s which only makes sense when attached to a nominal stem. Alternatively, a noun like book is called a free morpheme because it makes sense all by itself and refers to something in the real world, or is called a stem for an affix to be attached to.
Affixes are prefixes such as the English un- in unhappy and suffixes such as the English -able in laughable. Affixes can also be derivational or inflectional. In general, inflectional affixes refer to elements such as the plural marker –s in English and are fewer in number than derivational affixes as the former function to create forms of words with additional grammatical meaning such as plurality. Other inflectional morphemes in English include -ed indicating past tense, -ing progressive, -’s possessive, -er comparative, -est superlative, etc. Derivational morphemes such as -able in English tend to be more numerous than inflectional affixes in a language as they operate on a stem, or a root, like laugh resulting in a new word laughable. Other derivational affixes in English include re- in replay, -ment in establishment, -y in lucky, etc. Finally, not all bound morphemes are affixes, there are also bound roots such as –sist in English that constitutes the root, or stem, for derivational processes such as to generate words like resist, consist, subsist in spite of the fact that they cannot occur by themselves to make sense in a language, just like morphologically bound affixes. Although they are not free morphemes that make up most stems, they still provide a base form to shape new words with other derivational affixes in a language.
Compared to English, the boundary of a Chinese word is far from transparent, as many morphological markers like affixes are often non-existent because the Chinese language does not mark tense, or parts of speech, morphologically. The fluidity of the concept “word” in Chinese has even motivated some to claim (Hoosain 1992, Zhang 1992) that morphemes are more versatile in Chinese than other languages and more indeterminate with respect to their bound–free status. The notion of “word”, known as c? in Chinese, is neither a particularly intuitive concept nor easily defined. Furthermore, Chinese orthography requires no space between characters, regardless of their morphological status, i.e., no distinction is made in writing between free and bound morphemes, which obscures their existence in the speaker’s mindset. On the other hand, wenz? “characters” that are used to represent each morpheme syllable with a character regardless of its morphological status appear to be a more natural concept. Perhaps because of this reason, nearly all Chinese dictionaries list vocabularies through characters, instead of words. Thus dictionaries are most commonly referred to as z?dian, literally “character standards.”
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