Compounds¶
Bibliography
Robert Allen, Allen's Dictionary of English Phrases (rev. edn, London, 2008).
韓書庚, ‘清末民初同素異序構式研究’, doctoral thesis, 山東師範大學, 2019.
韓曉明 et al., ‘離合詞是詞還是短語：基於漢語母語者認知的考察’, 語言文字應用, 2 (2024), 112–23.
季忠平, 中古漢語語典詞研究 (Shanghai, 2013).
曲晏松, ‘清末民初白話離合詞研究’, master's thesis, 山東師範大學, 2021.
王雲路－王健, ‘基於詞彙史角度的漢語離合詞研究’, 文獻語言學, 10 (2020), 65–79.
楊榮祥, ‘古漢語同義詞辨析的途徑——以「制」「度」為例’, 語文研究, 114 (2010), 28–34.
葉狂－潘海華, ‘離合詞的句法本質再探’, 當代語言學, 20/4 (2018), 605–15.
余嘉錫, 世說新語箋疏 (Peking, 1983).
張巍, ‘中古漢語同素逆序詞演變研究’, doctoral thesis, 復旦大學, 2005.
趙克勤, 古代漢語詞彙學 (Peking, 1994).
Morph order¶
Info
Chao (1994: 33) was speaking as a two-time editor of Tz'u yüan when he advocated wordhood for any compound which occurred frequently in texts.
The notion of a compound 'word' (tz'u) with fixed constituent order is foreign to pre-modern Chinese.
As in languages with a free phrasal constituent order, this freedom was exploited for literary purposes. Han (2019: 75) shows a steady increase in the pairs of two-morpheme compounds with reversed morphs throughout history, whilst the data in Chang (2005: 88) confirms Yü's (1983[1953]: 791–2) theory that there was a consistent preference (70.5%) for ordering morphs by the four tones.
Compounds of synonyms¶
A less well-known function of compounds of synonyms was to remove the lexical ambiguity of polysemous words (Chao 1994: 33).
Warning
Yang (2010: 33) raises the possibility of using 互注 as evidence for the semantic equivalence of such synonyms, but sets the bar too low. For the equivalence to obtain, they have to be interchangeable as lemma and gloss in the writings of the same commentator.
In the case of 制, he also misquotes Cheng Hsüan, who wrote 制法度 in his Li chi commentary.
Allusive compounds¶
Quote
The treatment of phrases in the major historical dictionaries is far less rigorous than the coverage of individual words.
— Robert Allen
Allen (2008) is the standard work on the origins of allusive phrases in the lingua franca. Chi (2013) lays the ground for an etymological dictionary of the allusive compounds in Chinese.
Ionisation¶
This is the colloquial phenomenon of a lexeme being realised by two words, each of which has its own syntactic behaviour.
Much energy was wasted in the past on ahistorical explanations. Ch'ü (2021) is a step in the right direction, and Wang and Wang (2020) have shown how much work remains to be done.
Warning
Experiment 1 in Han et al. (2024) tested the subjects' analytical skills, not their intuition. It'd have been far better to ask how many words they saw in each expression.
Yeh and P'an (2018) only has entertainment value.