English Language Teaching and Linguistics Studies
ISSN 2640-9836 (Print) ISSN 2640-9844 (Online)

Vol. 6, No. 2, 2024
www.scholink.org/ojs/index.php/eltls

163

Original Paper

A Study of the Types of Morphemization in Contemporary

Chinese
Bo Feng1

1 College of Foreign Studies, Guangxi Normal University, Guilin, China

Received: February 16, 2024 Accepted: April 02, 2024 Online Published: April 18, 2024

doi:10.22158/eltls.v6n2p163 URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.22158/eltls.v6n2p163

Abstract

All living languages change and linguistic change occurs at all levels of linguistic systems. Morphemes,

as elements used for coining new words, are often subject to language change. This paper attempts to

study morphemization in Chinese, which is a type of morphological change in languages. It is found

that syllables in phonetic borrowings and those in lianmian-words in Chinese are the two sources of

morphemization in contemporary Chinese. What’s more, Morphemization of syllables in phonetic

borrowings mainly happen in the phonetic borrowings from Sanskrit and English.

Keywords

Morpheme, morphemization, phonetic borrowings, lianmian-words

1. Introduction

Every living language is in a continuous state of variation across time, and language change occurs at

all levels of linguistic systems, including sounds, word structure, sentence structure, etc. As the

smallest units of a language, morphemes are not stable. Thus, the morphological systems of a language

are dynamic. In contemporary Chinese, there exists a type of morphological change called

“morphemization”, which has become more and more prevalent. It is a linguistic phenomenon that

syllables which were not meaningful originally and were not word-building elements now contain

semantic information and are capable of combining with other morphemes to form new words. In the

evolution of Chinese morphemes, there exist a vast quantity of linguistic units which have shifted the

status from meaningless syllables into morphemes. This paper aims to make a detailed study of all the

types of morphemization in contemporary Chinese and describe how this linguistic phenomenon

happened in Chinese.



www.scholink.org/ojs/index.php/eltls English Language Teaching and Linguistics Studies Vol. 6, No. 2, 2024

Published by SCHOLINK INC.
164

2. Morphemization of Syllables in Phonetic Borrowings

In Chinese, syllables in phonetic borrowings are the most common entities to undergo morphemization.

No language ever finds itself spoken in a completely isolated environment, with no contact at all

between its speakers and the speakers of other languages. The ceaseless contact between speakers of

different languages has often had a great impact on the historical development of those languages, such

as the birth of pidgins, creoles, bilingualism, diglossia, etc. Among them, the most obvious is the

borrowing of words.

While borrowing words from other languages, the receiving language usually adopts different strategies,

such as transliteration, loan translation, loan blend, etc. By transliteration, a foreign word is transcribed

phonetically almost one-to-one by the characters of the receiving language. Words borrowed through

this strategy are named phonetic borrowings, for the pronunciations of the words are transmitted from

the lending languages to the borrowing languages.

Chinese has borrowed numerous words from other languages through transliteration. As characters in

phonetic borrowings mainly simulate the pronunciations of the words in the original language, they are

mostly not indicative of any meaning, though they probably have original meanings as native Chinese

characters. Therefore, they are regarded as meaningless syllables rather than morphemes.

Language is always in the process of development. Some of the meaningless syllables in phonetic

borrowings may change their status into meaningful units, and thus functioning as morphemes to derive

series of words. This type of language change is considered to be morphemization of syllables. In the

following parts, we shall look at this type of morphemization in phonetic borrowings from Sanskrit and

English.

2.1 Phonetic Borrowings from Sanskrit

It has been a long time since morphemization of meaningless syllables in Chinese phonetic borrowings

took place for the first time. Sun Jishan (1995, p. 32) claims that it first happened to phonetic

borrowings from Sanskrit. Monosyllabic morphemes that evolved from multi-syllabic borrowings

appeared quite early in Buddhist terms (Su, 2003, p. 6).

During the course of the development of the Chinese language, there have been three periods when

massive numbers of foreign words entered Chinese. The first time Chinese borrowed foreign words on

a large scale was after Zhang Qian’s journeys when a large number of words from countries of Central

and West Asia were adopted. Then at the end of Western Han Dynasty, Buddhism was introduced into

China from India, which brought about the borrowing of numerous words of Sanskrit origin. The third

time Chinese absorbed a large quantity of words from other languages was at the end of Ming Dynasty

and the beginning of Qing Dynasty when words from western languages poured into Chinese

vocabulary due to the increasing social contacts between China and western countries. Of the three

most significant periods in the enrichment of Chinese vocabulary, the second one during which Sanskrit

words swarmed into the Chinese language in great numbers is considered to be the most influential one,

for words borrowed during this period exceeded the other two periods greatly and they have influenced



www.scholink.org/ojs/index.php/eltls English Language Teaching and Linguistics Studies Vol. 6, No. 2, 2024

Published by SCHOLINK INC.
165

the development of Chinese vocabulary greatly in various ways (Liang, 1994).

As Buddhism was a totally foreign culture to Chinese people when it was introduced into China,

transliteration was employed as the main strategy to translate Buddhist scriptures. Therefore, a great

many phonetic borrowings from Sanskrit came into being in the Chinese language, which were

multi-syllabic at the early stage of usage, such as 塔婆, 佛陀, 僧伽, 魔罗, 比丘尼, etc. Later, people

extracted one character from each word to stand for the meaning of the whole and combined it with

other morphemes to form several new words. As a result, these characters, which were formerly just

syllables without any lexical information, have acquired meanings and become morphemes.

The following table offers us some of the morphemes extracted from the phonetic borrowings from

Sanskrit and the new words formed by them.

Table 1. Examples of Morphemization in Phonetic Borrowings from Sanskrit

phonetic borrowings extracted morphemes new formations

佛陀 佛 佛教 佛经 佛法 佛门 佛殿 佛堂 佛像

佛家 拜佛 借花献佛

塔婆 塔 宝塔 铁塔 石塔 塔基 塔门 木塔

魔罗 魔 魔鬼 魔怪 魔王 魔爪 魔障 妖魔 恶魔

邪魔 着魔

僧伽 僧 僧人 僧徒 僧侣 僧尼 斋僧 老僧 高僧

禅那 禅 禅宗 禅心 禅寺 禅房 禅杖 禅语 坐禅

比丘尼 尼 尼姑 尼庵 僧尼

释迦牟尼 释 释家 释教 释典 释藏

Liang (1994, p. 181) reports that there are twenty-one monosyllabic Buddhist terms in Chinese which

are detached from multi-syllabic phonetic borrowings of Sanskrit origin and are productive

word-building elements. A lot of words, most of which are bisyllabic, are formed by the combination of

these monosyllabic morphemes and Chinese morphemes, as illustrated with the examples in the above

table.

2.2 Phonetic Borrowings from English

Apart from Sanskrit, English is another major contributor to Chinese vocabulary. The borrowings from

English have exerted a great influence on Chinese vocabulary and morphology. “The most obvious

morphological change is that more bisyllabic and polysyllabic words have appeared in Chinese, as a

result of transliterating English words” (Hu, 2003, p. 224). For example, 幽默, 逻辑, 坦克, 沙发, 的

确良 for humour, logic, tank, sofa, Dacron. Since the syllables in phonetic borrowings are used for

their phonetic contents alone, they are meaningless and can’t be regarded as morphemes. Instead, the

whole word, which contains more than one syllable, appears to be one morpheme.



www.scholink.org/ojs/index.php/eltls English Language Teaching and Linguistics Studies Vol. 6, No. 2, 2024

Published by SCHOLINK INC.
166

Every living language has a kind of assimilating power. When or after a foreign word is borrowed into

one language, it has to conform partially or totally to the phonetic, graphical or morphological standard

of the borrowing language (Hu, p. 108). Influenced by the characteristics of the Chinese language that

most Chinese single characters are morphemes and bisyllabic words constitute a large proportion of the

basic word stock, many meaningless syllables in phonetic borrowings have been taken as meaningful

units and used as word-building blocks to derive numbers of new words, especially bisyllabic words.

According to the collected data morphemization of meaningless syllables in phonetic borrowings from

English is confined to nouns. In what follows, we shall find two subcategories of nouns, namely

common nouns and proper nouns.

1) Common nouns

In the past years, English has exerted a significant influence on Chinese morphology owing to the

contact of the two languages. Guo Hongjie (2002; 2005) claims that the phenomenon of

morphemization is one impact of English loan words on Chinese morphology. As the phonetic

borrowings are being used more and more frequently, some syllables that represent only phonetic

contents of loan words in the original language have been detached from the loan words and represent

the semantic contents of their parent words. As new morphemes, they have been particularly rich

sources of new words in the historical evolution of Chinese.

Table 2 lists the new morphemes derived from some common nouns of phonetic borrowings from

English and the new words formed by them.

Table 2. Examples of Morphemization in Borrowed Common Nouns from English

common nouns extracted morphemes new formations

的士 的 打的 的哥 的姐 拦的 的票 面的 残的 摩的

马的 驴的

巴士 巴 大巴 中巴 小巴 豪华巴 冷气巴

啤酒 啤 扎啤 鲜啤 散啤 听啤 青啤 冰啤 黑啤

模特 模 名模 男模 女模

酒吧 吧 吧娘 吧女 吧台 茶吧 书吧 网吧 陶吧 剪吧

冰吧

迪斯科 迪 迪厅 蹦迪 迪吧 迪友 迪姐 老年迪

咖啡 咖 热咖 苦咖 奶咖 冷咖 黑咖 品咖

卡片 卡 龙卡 绿卡 磁卡 打卡 信用卡 饭卡 储值卡

电话卡

奥林匹克 奥 申奥 奥赛 奥班 奥星 奥运村 奥委会

It’s significant to note two points suggested by the examples in the above table. Firstly, the new



www.scholink.org/ojs/index.php/eltls English Language Teaching and Linguistics Studies Vol. 6, No. 2, 2024

Published by SCHOLINK INC.
167

morphemes are predominantly formed by taking the first syllable of each word, with the only exception

of 吧, which is detached from酒吧. Wang (1992, p. 46) provides us with a reasonable explanation of it.

He says that the shortening of 的士, 巴士, 模特, 迪斯科, 啤酒 into 的, 巴, 模, 迪, 啤 conforms

to Chinese morphology and the principle of abbreviation in that the distinctive meaning of a

compounded word is usually conveyed by the first morpheme of it and the main principle of

abbreviation is to retain the semantic information of the original word in the shortened form. As most

phonetic borrowings are bisyllabic, they are likely to be treated as compounds, though they are of

foreign origins and represent only the sounds of the words in the original language. The only exception

is 吧 from the word 酒吧, which is an example of a special type of phonetic loans, namely phonetic

calques, which take the meaning as well as the sound of the source word into account. The reason for

the morphemization of 吧 rather than 酒 is that 吧 is the character which corresponds to the sound

of the borrowed word bar in English.

The second point to note is that some of those new morphemes, while conveying the exact meanings of

the original words, have extended their meanings. Two typical examples are 的 from 的士 and 吧

from 酒吧. In words like 打的, 的哥, 的姐, 的票, 的 means 的士 exactly. However, in words like

面的, 摩的, 马的, 驴的, etc., 的 refers to any vehicles for rent. Similar to 的, the morpheme 吧,

besides signifying 酒吧, can now refer to any small public house offering certain services, as shown by

the words 书吧, 网吧, 茶吧, etc.

Apart from the extension of meaning, 的 and 吧 have even been used as free morphemes, as

illustrated with the following expressions:

1） 几个人一部的。

2） “赶快打的去。” 有人喊。可美术馆距火车站太近，有“的” 不愿意去啊。

3） 泡各种各样的吧。

A statement can be made from the above expressions that 的 and 吧 have fully evolved into

morphemes, being either bound or free. Zhou Hongbo (1995, p. 64) contends that the degree of

morphemization of syllables representing phonetic contents of borrowed words varies. According to

him, the criteria used to measure the degree of morphemization include: 1) explicitness: the capability

of conveying a context-free meaning; 2) productivity: the capability of combining with other

morphemes.

Su (2003, p. 6) claims that it’s quite difficult to distinguish the two statuses of “having already

undergone morphemization” and “being undergoing morphemization”, for they are dynamic and there

is a continuum upon which the two statuses rest. What’s significant is to realize the existence of this

phenomenon and to break the shackles of the traditional idea that the morphological systems of

Chinese are stable and monosyllabic morphemes all derive from our native language. In the present

study, we consider syllables in phonetic borrowings to have become morphemes so long as they convey

explicit meanings and are capable of forming more than one new word.

2) Proper nouns



www.scholink.org/ojs/index.php/eltls English Language Teaching and Linguistics Studies Vol. 6, No. 2, 2024

Published by SCHOLINK INC.
168

Proper nouns in phonetic borrowings are another class of words where we can seek out several

examples of morphemization of meaningless syllables. Generally, Chinese borrows proper nouns from

other languages by transliteration. To fit in with Chinese, many syllables in them are quite potential to

be abstracted from the whole words to represent the meanings of them. Those proper nouns include

names of places, countries, people and measures.

Table 3 presents some examples of morphemization in borrowed nouns signifying names of places,

countries and people.

Table 3. Examples of Morphemization in Borrowed Proper Nouns

proper nouns extracted morphemes new formations

英格兰 英 英国 英军 英尺 英里 英联邦 英文

美利坚 美 美国 美元 美钞 美军 美金 美式

德意志 德 德国 东德 西德 德军 德寇 德文 德语

亚细亚 亚 亚洲 东亚 西亚 中亚 亚运会

苏维埃 苏 苏联 苏军 苏共 苏制

马克思 马 马列主义 马哲

莎士比亚 莎 莎翁 莎剧

Apart from borrowed nouns denoting names of places, countries and people, those signifying units as a

standard of measurements, which are not only of English origin, are another special class of proper

nouns to which morphemization happens. The following table offers some of them and the morphemes

that evolved from them.

Table 4. Examples of Morphemization of Proper Nouns Signifying Units

proper nouns origins extracted morphemes

摩尔 English mole 摩

瓦特 English watt 瓦

米突 French mètre 米

安培 French Ampè 安

伏特 Italian Volta 伏

欧姆 German Ohm 欧

Traditionally, the morphemes listed above are considered to be the abbreviated forms. In the present

study, they are also regarded as cases of morphemization on account of the following three points: 1)

when appearing in the borrowed words, the single characters are meaningless syllables that just

simulate the sounds of the borrowed words in the original languages; 2) the single characters express



www.scholink.org/ojs/index.php/eltls English Language Teaching and Linguistics Studies Vol. 6, No. 2, 2024

Published by SCHOLINK INC.
169

explicit meanings when they are used in different contexts; 3) the single characters are capable of

attaching to members of a certain category, namely numerals like 一, 二, 三, 千, 万, and so on. The

fundamental difference between them and the cases listed in the first three tables is that they have a

relatively limited productivity in word formation.

As we have seen, the proper nouns involved in morphemization are mainly from English, with only a

small proportion from other languages, which are a few units of length, electrical power, force,

resistance, etc. As discussed earlier, English has exerted a significant influence on Chinese morphology.

Thus, a conclusion can be made here that apart from phonetic borrowings from Sanskrit, those from

English is another major locus of the occurrence of morphemization of syllables.

3. Morphemization of Syllables in Lianmian-Words

In addition to phonetic loan words, some lianmian-words in Chinese are also the locus of the

occurrence of morphemization. Lianmian-words are disyllabic single-morpheme words that consists of

two syllables. Generally speaking, a lianmian-word is an inseparable entity and a monomorphemic

word. Thus, the constituent parts of it are meaningless syllables rather than morphemes. However, in

language use, there exists the practice of separating the component parts of a lianmian-word and

combining the segments with other morphemes to form series of words. See the examples in the

following table.

Table 5. Examples of Morphemization of Syllables in Lianmian-words

lianmian-words extracted morphemes new formations

蝴蝶 蝶 粉蝶 彩蝶 花蝶 蝶泳

骆驼 驼 驼峰 驼背 驼铃 驼绒 驼队

蜘蛛 蛛 喜蛛 毒蛛 幼蛛 蛛网 蛛丝

玻璃 玻 钢玻 彩玻 硬玻 毛玻 玻壳

蚂蚁 蚁 雌蚁 雄蚁 工蚁 兵蚁

蜥蜴 蜥 巨蜥 草蜥 蛇蜥 鳄蜥 飞蜥

蟾蜍 蟾 蟾宫 蟾酥

The most widely accepted way of identifying morphemes is substitution, to substitute an element in a

word with a morpheme to determine whether it is a morpheme or not. Take 粉蝶 for instance, 粉 is

able to be substituted with other morphemes, such as 花 and 彩. And蝶 keeps a fixed meaning while

combining with 粉 , 彩 and 花. At the same time, in the words 粉蝶, 彩蝶 and 花蝶, 蝶 can also

be substituted with other morphemes with no doubt. The two-way substitution manifests that 蝶 is a

morpheme in the words 粉蝶, 彩蝶 and 花蝶. It must be made clear that by claiming that 蝶 is a

morpheme in words like花蝶, 粉蝶, 彩蝶, it doesn’t mean that the case is the same in the word 蝴蝶,



www.scholink.org/ojs/index.php/eltls English Language Teaching and Linguistics Studies Vol. 6, No. 2, 2024

Published by SCHOLINK INC.
170

which is doubtlessly a monomorphemic word. Once 蝶 is used in the lianmian-word, it’s not a

morpheme any more.

With regard to the relationship between 蝶 and 蝴蝶, Yang Xipeng (2004, p. 45) and Cao Wei (2004,

p. 23) state that they are just shortened forms and original forms. In order to cater to the features of

Chinese word formation, people tend to use one syllable to express the meaning of a multi-syllabic

monomorphemic word and combine this syllable with another morpheme to create new words.

Therefore, the shortened forms are carrying the meanings of the original forms and become meaningful

linguistic units.

4. Conclusion

In this paper, the author has made exhaustive classifications of the types of morphemization in

contemporary Chinese, illustrated with a large number of examples. Morphemization in Chinese is

classified into two categories in this paper: morphemization of syllables in phonetic borrowings and

morphemization of syllables in lianmian-words. According to the different origins of phonetic

borrowings, the first category is further classified into two subcategories, namely morphemization in

phonetic borrowings from Sanskrit and those from English, including borrowed common nouns and

proper nouns from English. As a type of morphological change that has become more and more

prevalent in Chinese, morphemization deserves a good deal of attention of language researchers,

especially those who study morphology and lexicology. As it continues to occur in Chinese, deep

studies of it will not only contribute to better understanding of how languages change and correct

predictions of the development of morphemes, but also help language users to increase their vocabulary

and even to make up new words in certain circumstances to enhance the expressive power of language.

References

Cao W. (2004). Research on Modern Chinese Vocabulary. Beijing: Peking University Press.

Guo H. J. (2002). English Loanwords in Contemporary Chinese and Their Impact on Chinese: the

Period from 1980s to the Present. Journal of PLA University of Foreign Languages, (5), 1-4.

Hu. Z. Y. (2003). Language Contact and Lexical Borrowing of English and Chinese; A Comprehensive

Study. Jinan: Shandong University Press.

Liang X. H. (1994). The Structure of Buddhist Words and the Development of Chinese Words. Beijing:

Beijing Language Institute Press.

Su X. C. (2003). On Formation and Extraction of Monophonic Morphemes of Foreign Origins in

Contemporary Chinese. Studies of the Chinese Language, (6), 1-11.

Sun J. S. (1995) Formation and Characteristics of Morphemization of Meaningless Syllables. Journal

of Language and Literature Studies, (5), 32-34.

Yang X. P. (2004). On Chinese Morphemes. Nanjing: Nanjing University Press.

Zhou H. B. (1995). Morphemization of Transliterated Syllables in Loanwords. Applied Linguistics, (4),



www.scholink.org/ojs/index.php/eltls English Language Teaching and Linguistics Studies Vol. 6, No. 2, 2024

Published by SCHOLINK INC.
171

63-65.


	Abstract
	Keywords
	References