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On Early Chinese Morphology and its Intellectual History1

Winner of the Barwis–Holliday Award for 2001

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 April 2002

David Prager Branner
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Abstract

The medieval Chinese tradition tells us that a given Chinese character may change its meaning when its reading is altered slightly. Modern scholars have sought principles for these changes, and from those principles have reconstructed a skeletal system of early Chinese morphology – with such elements as derivation by tone change, causative infixes, transitivising prefixes, etc. Yet it is an arresting fact that some of pre-modern China's linguistically most astute scholars inveighed against the multiple readings on which this research is based. They seem to have held strong opinions, not always made explicit, about precisely how it is that Chinese characters represent language. These two views, modern and traditional, represent fundamentally different models of how early Chinese evolved into modern Chinese.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society , Volume 13 , Issue 1 , April 2003 , pp. 45 - 76
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Asiatic Society 2003

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Footnotes

1

An earlier version of this paper was read 17 January, 2000, at the University of Hong Kong, and a still earlier version as “Did Early Chinese Really Have Morphology”? (delivered 1 November, 1998, Annual Meeting of the Western Branch of the American Oriental Society, Seattle). My thanks to South Coblin, Victor Mair, Tsu-Lin Mei, Martin Kern, Margaret Chu, and Thomas Bartlett. A portion of the writing of this paper was done with support from Victor Mair and the University of Pennsylvania.

References

1 An earlier version of this paper was read 17 January, 2000, at the University of Hong Kong, and a still earlier version as “Did Early Chinese Really Have Morphology”? (delivered 1 November, 1998, Annual Meeting of the Western Branch of the American Oriental Society, Seattle). My thanks to South Coblin, Victor Mair, Tsu-Lin Mei, Martin Kern, Margaret Chu, and Thomas Bartlett. A portion of the writing of this paper was done with support from Victor Mair and the University of Pennsylvania.