Bi-morphemic (di-syllabic) Compounds

In the last file on mono-syllabicity and di-syllabicity, we established the following for Mandarin Chinese:

Number of syllables per morpheme: overwhelmingly 1

Number of syllables per word: overwhelmingly 2

Therefore, we can say that the mono-syllabicity claim about Chinese is definitely not true at the word level; it is quite accurate though at the level of the morpheme. From the above two facts, we can further deduce the following:

Number of morpheme per word: overwhelmingly 2

Given the prevalence of the bi-morphemic compounds (words with two morphemes combined together) in Mandarin, we will first look at some examples of bi-morphemic compounds.

First, bi-morphemic compounds in Mandarin that correspond to bi-morphemic words in English (which, unlike Mandarin, may or may not be two syllables long):

Bi-morphemic Words in English	Bi-morphemic Compounds in Mandarin	Meanings of Component Morphemes
Read + er	Du + zhe	Read + er
Paint + er	Hua + jia	Paint + er
Sens + ible	Li + zhi	Reason + wisdom
Friend + ly	You + shan	Friend + nice
News + paper	Bao + zhi	Report + paper
Black + board	Hei + ban	Black + board
Air + plane	Fei + ji	Fly + machine
Auto + mobile	Qi + che	Steam + vehicle
Tele + phone	Dian + hua	Electric + speech

We can see that although all the Mandarin words are two syllables long, some of the English words are three or even four syllables long. Also interesting is the fact that even though the number of morphemes in the two languages are the same, the component morphemes may not mean the same things.

However, not all bi-morphemic compounds in Mandarin correspond to bi-morphemic words in English. In fact, two morphemes compounds in Mandarin very often correspond to one-morpheme words in English:

Mono-morphemic English words	Bi- morphemic Chinese words	Meanings of Component morphemes
man	nan + ren	male + person
woman	nu + ren	female + person
merchant	shang + ren	commerce + person
pork	zhu + rou	pig + meat
beef	niu + rou	cow + meat
lamb	yang + rou	sheep + meat
car	qi + che	air + vehicle
train	huo + che	fire + vehicle
tram/trolley	dian + che	electricity + vehicle
switch	kai + guan	open + shut
length	chang + duan	long + short
study	xue + xi	study + practice
see	kan + jian	look + perceive
hear	ting + jian	listen + perceive
break	da + po	hit + broken
bring	dai + lai	bring + come
clean	gan + jing	dry + clean
work	gong + zuo	work + work

As we can see, it is entirely possible for the same meaning to be expressed by either one morpheme or two morphemes in different languages.

The natural question one might want to ask is: why use two morphemes if you can do it with one? Compared with English, isn’t there a waste of linguistic resources in Mandarin? Isn’t there more complexity than is necessary?

But wait! Let’s not make hasty judgments. Economy and simplicity probably should not be based entirely on morpheme counts in isolated words. Can we make a case for Mandarin being actually more economical than English?

Yes, we may be able to. For example, even though there is one more morpheme in Mandarin per word on this word list, we may not be adding to the total number of morphemes in the language. Many of the morphemes are not created anew but rather already existent in the language, e.g., ren ‘person’, rou ‘meat’ and che ‘vehicle’. Take the case of the vehicles. Chinese can form new words for different kinds of vehicles by using specific modifiers like qi, huo and dian in front of the general morpheme che. Since all of these morphemes are already part of the language (hard to think of a language without reference to fire, steam and even vehicle), no new morphemes are created in the language. So we can then say that it is actually English that may be wasting linguistic resources unnecessarily by creating separate one-morpheme words for different vehicles.

Do you see some differences in how the bi-morphemic compounds are formed? For answers, go on to the next file Structure of Compounds.