On the definition of word in Mandarin Chinese:A case study of"criterion words"
This paper discusses some key issues in the definition of word in Mandarin Chinese based on a close scrutiny of the so-called"criterion words"defined by Zhu(1982).It is shown that the definition of criterion words as"bound words"that can only appear before nouns or the particle de has both theoretical and empirical flaws.I argue that crite-rion words should be redefined as roots.To be specific,monosyllabic elements such as nan'male'should be redefined as bound roots with no syntactic category and disyllabic ele-ments such as zidong'automatic'should be redefined as compound roots.Facts are pro-vided to demonstrate the superiority of the new definition and clarifications are made to ex-plain potential controversies.I also address an important issue brought up in the discussion of criterion words,namely how to distinguish compound nouns from noun phrases in Man-darin Chinese.After reviewing the expansion test proposed by Lu et al(1957)and a proce-dure proposed by Deng(2020a),I suggest a revision to Deng's procedure,which is shown to be able to deal with difficult cases.
"criterion word"definition of wordroot and compound rootdistinction between compounds and phrases
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