Resumen de Morphological semi-phrasemes in Mandarin Chinese: an atypical collocational phenomenon
This paper presents an atypical form of "collocation" found in Mandarin Chinese. It aims at showing that in this language, and probably in others with similar features, "collocational phenomena" do not occur only at the syntagmatic level (i.e. within a phrase), as in Western languages such as English or French, but also at the morphological level, within a wordform. This is due to the large number of semantically compositional compound wordforms in Chinese. This paper uses two criteria distinguishing wordforms from phrases to demonstrate that Chinese has semantically compositional compounds: the external modifier criterion and the non-conjunction reduction criterion. It then shows that among these compositional compounds, some are "morphological" semi-phrasemes: the combinatorial properties of one of their components are affected by some phraseologization. This paper also discusses how "morphological" semi-phrasemes should be treated in an Explanatory Combinatorial Dictionary of Chinese.
