The Morphology of Chinese: A Linguistic and Cognitive Approach

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This book aims to dispel the myth that Chinese "doesn't have words" but instead "has characters." Jerome Packard challenges the common belief that Chinese has no morphology, demonstrating how analysis of Chinese word formation enhances our understanding of word universals in natural language. His book describes the intimate relationship between words and their components and offers new insights into their evolution. Models are offered for how Chinese words are stored in the mental lexicon and processed in natural speech.

The Morphology of Chinese: A Linguistic and Cognitive Approach Review

Please note that my comments will reflect my being neither a qualified nor experienced linguist. I purchased this book because I have found guides to the morphology of a language to be a useful approach (one of many) to learning a language. Another "morphology" I found handy in language learning was The Morphology of Biblical Greek by William D. Mounce (ISBN: 0310226368).

Languages can generally be divided into the following units (of ascending size) for the purpose of study: phoneme (sound), morpheme (meaningful unit - word or part of a word), syntax (grammar) and semantics (text/story). This may be modelled in different ways by different theorists. This book is, of course, focussing on the second of these units, that of the morpheme. It looks at words, parts of words, particles and focusses on the very meaning of the concept "word" itself.

I've already mentioned my lack of linguistics background. If you are approaching this book as a linguist, you'll get much more out of it than me, at many more levels. A simple (!) learner of Chinese can also benefit, in the sense that s/he can gain a greater "feel" for the language using linguistics, as opposed to grammar - though the two at times overlap. But read on!

Here in China I showed a number of native speakers some charts/tables from this book. They were unanimous that they had never heard of quite a few of the example words (usually disyllables). Admittedly, the words may still be used in other areas of China, however, I recommend you proceed with the same caution. Before memorising lists of words from the tables, ensure they are in common usage, at least somewhere in China or a Chinese community. Otherwise you're wasting your time majoring on minors when it is more profitable to learn words in common use.

I felt a little confused as to what is classified as an affix. In two places (possibly more) there are brief lists (I've omitted the characters themselves, but have included the tone number, with neutral tones unmarked):

Page 160: "...bound, affix-type word-forming elements like -tou, -zi, -hua4, -zhe3, -xing4, -le and -men."

Page 299: "...grammatical affixes: e.g., -le, -zhe [which is rare in modern Chinese], -guo, -de, bu-, and -men..."

I felt that, though this isn't a grammar as such, some of these categories could have been placed as a chart in an appendix to increase the overall usability of the book. Even better, perhaps a chapter at the beginning to explain some of the linguistic terms (for "gestalt word", read "compiled word" -ci2) and frameworks. In my opinion, that would enable learners of Chinese to gain so much more from this volume. A chapter like that could be comfortably ignored by linguists (whose purpose escapes me at times - I guess "someone's gotta do it").

The author, Jerome "Jerry" Packard, is currently professor of Linguistics and East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign).

In writing up this review I must acknowledge that I visited listserv linguistlist, and you'd do well to do the same, either directly or through a search engine with a few appropriate key words.

Not being a linguist I didn't want to post an unfair review, so depending on your needs: Highly recommended - 5 stars.

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