| Previous studies in Chinese compounding have focused mainly on the division of word and phrase and several overlapping properties between compound and phrase; more should be done to probe deep into the internal structure within the compounds. In this thesis, we first subcategorize verb-noun compounds into five groups with respect to the internal relations between the two morphemes and their linear order.With respect to the division between lexicon and syntax, the most controversial phenomenon lies in the traditionally termed splittable VN compound (Liheci离合词). According to the Lexical Integrity Hypothesis (LIH), these compounds look like phrases. However, cross-linguistically, LIH is far from being sufficient in defining word. Moreover, splittable VN compounds, though violating LIH in some cases, are still different from phrases in the following three respects. First, the separation does not affect the semantic interpretation of the compound; secondly, the topicalization structure that renders the compound into two parts, i.e. topic and comment, is constrained; thirdly, the intervening elements are also restricted, whereas a phrase can be separated freely. Thus, splittable VN compounds are better analyzed as words rather than phrases.With regard to external syntactic properties of VN compounds, namely, their valency and argument structure properties, we put forward a new characterization of Chinese VN compounds based on Mithun's (1984) cross-linguistic classification of noun incorporation (NI) in the attempt to bring Chinese VN compounds into a broader cross-linguistic perspective.Finally, we compare the lexicalist formation approach with the syntactic derivation approach to the formation of Chinese VN compounds, and present arguments against the syntactic approach. |
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