Classification Issues for Chinese Compound Neologisms

Compounds have received much attention in recent years; several proposals for classification have been put forth in the international literature. This article, developed within the Morbo/comp project on compounds, aims at contributing to a widening of the debate on the classification of Chinese compounds and their internal structure initiated by Ceccagno and Scalise (2006). To this end, we briefly introduce the existing classifications put forth by different scholars for compounds and in particular we will focus on the approaches proposed for Chinese compounding. We then discuss how to apply to Chinese the classification for compounds argued for by Bisetto and Scalise (2005). After highlighting some shortcomings of this classification with respect to Chinese compounds, we propose a refinement of it through a new definition of the three macro-types proposed by the two authors. We present a new table of Chinese compounds based on an analysis of a corpus of neologisms.