Die Abgrenzung der Wörter im modernen Chinesisch

Abstract

In China, a widespread discussion of the concept of "word" set in in the fifties, when the Hanyu pinyin fang’an was being worked out. Since then, a pinyin orthography has been added. But in many ways, the rules of orthography do not seem convincing, mainly because the definition of the word underlying these rules is not as precise as it should be. In this paper, some criteria for delimitating words and phrases are examined. Such criteria are offered in Isaenko’s Opyt kitajsko-russkogo foneticeskogo slovarja (1957), Paul Kratochvil’s The Chinese Language Today (1968) and in Duanmu San’s essay "Wordhood in Chinese" (1998). Attention is focussed on modifier-noun constructions, verb-object constructions and the combinations of verbs with so-called "resultative complements", viz. resultative verbs.