Derivational and Inflectional Affixes in Chinese and Their Morphosyntactic Properties

The concepts being discussed in this chapter are bound morpheme, free morpheme, root, affix, semi-affix, inflection, derivation and their application in the analysis of Chinese word-formation process. The inflectional affixes include aspectual markers, plural marker, potential infixes as well as those involved in reduplication. Two major approached are presented in this chapter about the derivation of Chinese words. The essence of the morphological derivation approach is that most word-building blocks have equal status as free root and bound roots, except for affixes. Chinese words are formed with these roots according to morphological rules and the syntactic status of a word is determined by its head. The essence of the syntactic-semantic is that the majority of Chinese words are constructed according to syntactic rules in that the relationship between morphemes in a word could be described as conjunction, modification, subject-predicate, verb-object or verb-result. A few bound morphemes are treated as affixes since their semantic content has been bleached, and they form words with morphological rules.