Study Of Chinese Two-tone Compound Words

The problem of Chinese word formation has been sporadically mentioned in traditional exegesis. In modern academic, the study of Chinese word formation, started from Ma Jianzhong’s "Ma Shi Wen Tong", which is written in 1898. Ma Jianzhong is believed to be the person who "built the modern research prototype of Chinese word formation." Following "Ma Shi Wen Tong", the Chinese word formation problem, especially in the sphere of Chinese compound words, has caught Chinese scholars’ attention, which results in many academic outcomes. However, those researches vary in terms of classification. Different scholars distinguish various types of word formation, utilize different names for similar contents and vise versa. These divergences reflect that different scholars start from different perspectives, such as syntax, semantics or phonetics.In this thesis, my corpus is based on the Chinese compound words systematically extracted from the "Chinese Dictionary". This thesis, including three aspects, which are syntax, semantics and phonetics, combining quantitative and qualitative research methods and consulting from western theories and traditional Chinese studies, reviews and analyzes the history and development of the problem of Chinese word formation since more than one hundred years ago.The first part focuses on the introduction of grammatical aspect. Scholars who study Chinese word formation analogically based on syntactic structure have proposed "pian-zheng", "verb-object", "Juxtaposed", and other categories. However, using syntactic structure analogies to study the structure of Chinese words does not help much when we try to understand the meaning of a two-tone compound word. Because it is the meaning rather than the form matters.The second part summaries the semantic perspective. It is particularly important to study Chinese in the term of semantics, since Chinese is a language lack of form variations. Therefore, studying the problem of Chinese word formation in compound words has to dig deeply into certain word to clarify the relationships between morphemes and the meaning of morpheme and the meaning of the word. Further more, it is crucial to explore the meaning of the word from the beginning of coinage in order to analyze its structure and to find out the key factors, which convert complex semantic structures to fixed words.The third part concentrates in phonetic analysis. This is a new perspective, which studies Chinese word formation from the perspectives of syllables, tones and rhythms. Guo Shao Yu, Feng Shengli and other scholars have proposed important theories, like "flexible saying" and "Rhythmical Formation" to help us look at the Chinese word formation problem in new ways.In conclusion, it is important to borrow insights from all the three perspectives, which are syntax, semantics, or phonetics, to study Chinese compound words’ word formation problem. Wang Ning’s theory of "no-syntactic nature " does not deny the contributions from grammatical perspective, but to combine the grammatical and semantic perspectives to deepen our understanding in word-formation. Distinguishing syntactic and semantic word formative angles fits well in the actual condition of the structure of compound words.