Study On The Morphological Function Of Disyllable In Mandarin Nouns And Verbs

Morphology studies on the changes of word form which are relevant to their grammatical properties, and word is on the interface of Phonology, Grammar and Semantics, so morphology is the core of linguistic research.Based on the theory of formal syntax, Feng Shengli (2007, 2008) proposed that Prosody is the way of Chinese to realize its morphology, which functions similarly as the segmental elements in other languages. According to this hypothesis, this paper proved the idea of Feng (2007, 2008) through the Number morphology of nouns and the nominalization of verbs in Mandarin, then proposed that: Disyllable is a kind of supersegmental morphology of Mandarin, the realization of supersegmental morphology relies on the segmental elements, which is including affixation, compounding and reduplication etc.For the Number of nouns, countability is the essential property of count nouns, but the singular, dual and plural are the realization of this property. As for Mandarin nouns, disyllable is the morphological marker of their countability, and this morphology can be realized not only by the suffixes "Zi", "Er", "Tou", but also by the compounding of roots.Secondly, Disyllable is also the morphological marker of the nominalization of verbs. In the same way, this morphology can be realized by the suffixes "Zi", "Er", "Tou", and also compounding. Furthermore, this paper differentiated two kinds of nominalization: the inherent nominalization and the structural nominalization. Actually, Disyllable is the morphological marker of the inherent nominalization, and the structural nominalization has an effect on monosyllabic verbs.Although this dissertation has proved that Disyllable is the morphological marker of countability and verb nominalization, it is not the only way to express these two kinds of morphology, there are some other segmental markers that have the same function in Mandarin. However, these two kinds of morphological marker are different in their realization, their scope and grammatical layers of this function.Finally, based on the phenomena, this dissertation also showed the theoretical implications of morphology research: Morphology is one part of Universal Grammar of natural languages, but the realization of morphology is different, for example, the segmental way and the supersegmental way. What we have discussed above is only one of the supersegmental ways, there are still large number of phenomena in Chinese.This dissertation hopes to provide some language fact to the morphological research on natural languages, and also opens a window for Chinese morphological research. As for morphology, there is still much work to do.