A Distributed Morphological Study Of Chinese Compounds

Chinese compounds have always been a hot topic. During the last ten years, most linguists have adopted Lexicalism. Lexicalism claims that words are created and stored in the lexicon. It is problematic in the following ways:a) the Double-Engine Hypothesis causes a lot of burden whether theoretically or empirically; b) the lexicon is a vague linguistic notion; c) some problems cannot be well explained in Lexicalism. On the contrary, Distributed Morphology dumps the lexicon. The job which is assigned to lexicon are distributed into three components:a) morphosyntactic features; b) vocabulary; c) encyclopedia. The morphological operations and the syntactic operations are the same.This thesis proposes a novel analysis of Chinese Compounding under the framework of Distributed Morphology. The study mainly proposes and solves the following three questions: Q1:how can we identify Chinese compounds? Q2:how can we classify Chinese compounds? Q3:what is the mechanism of Chinese compounding within the framework of Distributed Morphology?As for the first question, I propose two kinds of tests to identify Chinese compounds: tests on the phonological stress and tests on the syntactic criteria. The syntactic criteria include syntactic impenetrability, inseparability and unalterability.Compounds can be divided into primary compounds and synthetic compounds. The thesis mainly covers the compounding of primary compounds. Primary compounds are classified into five sub-types:coordinative compounds, subordinative compounds, resultative compounds, verb-object compounds, and subject-predicate compounds.The thesis tries to demonstrate the mechanism of Chinese compounding. In DM, roots do not have any syntactic features, and the category is decided by the category-assigning morpheme. The coordinative compounds can be accounted by root merger. The subordinative compounds are created in root domain where the categorized head is merged with a root. The resultative compounds are constructed by merger and movements. When the breakable word behaves like a compound, it is derived by the merger of two roots; when it behaves like a phrase, it is derived by the merger of two phrases. The level of merger depends on the syntactic context. The subject-predicate compounds are derived in the following steps. In the first step, the root is merged with the category-assigning element n; the other root is merged with the category-assigning element a/v. In the second step, NP is merged with AP or VP.I propose that following the tenets of DM, Chinese compounds are derived by syntactic rules in the same way as the construction of phrase and syntax. The primitive linguistic constituent is not words but morphemes.