TY - JOUR
AU - 
AB - This essay argues that traditional criteria for wordhood do not work well for Chinese. Stress plays a minor role and cannot be used to determine phonological wordhood. There is little or no inflection to help us define the morphological word. Morphological compounds and syntactic word combinations are based on the same structures. Morpheme combinations are seldom absolutely inseparable. Word- like usage of so-called bound forms is extremely common. It seems natural to conclude that Chinese has no words, only morpheme combinations with varying degrees of cohesion. Keywords: word, morpheme, lexical item, Chinese, compound, syntax vs. morphology. 124 Halvor Eifring 1. The word “word” “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” We know now that this translation of the opening verse of the Gospel of St. John does not accurately render the Greek text, since the meaning of the Greek word logos is much more complex than that of its English near-equivalent word. Still, its use as a metaphor for something so holy that it is identical with God has placed the word at the very centre of the Western universe. Outside the religious sphere, words are, in the West, 
TI - Speech without words? An Essay Endeavouring a Probability That the Language of China Has No Words
JF - Acta Orientalia
DO - 10.5617/ao.4470
DA - 1970-01-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/unpaywall/speech-without-words-an-essay-endeavouring-a-probability-that-the-zyMs9A0sy0
DP - DeepDyve
ER -