Rationale: why investigate Chinese words?

Why is Chinese morphology worth investigating? To many, the very posing of this question will seem to suggest an ironic lack of relevance, due to the common belief that Chinese ‘doesn't have words’ but instead has ‘characters’, or that Chinese ‘has no morphology’ and so is ‘morphologically impoverished’. The powerful influence that characters have over conceptions of the Chinese language has led many investigators (e.g., Hoosain 1992, Xu 1997) to doubt the existence of words in Chinese. My goal is to demonstrate that speakers of Chinese compose and understand sentences just as speakers of any language do, by manipulating sentence constituents using rules of syntax, and that the smallest representatives of those constituents have the size, feel, shape and properties of words. And while Chinese may not have word forms that undergo morphological alternations such as give, gave, giving and given, Chinese does indeed have ‘morphology’, and the morphology that it has is of a most intriguing and enlightening sort.

Understanding how Chinese words are constructed and used is critical for a full understanding of how the Chinese language operates. Chinese native speakers possess implicit knowledge about the structure and use of words.