ABSTRACT
Prosodic morphology concerns the shapes and sizes of canonical words, affixation as well as word formation in a language. Although being a new area in general linguistics and especially in Chinese linguistics, many prosodic morphological phenomena have been recognized over the past half-century. A natural foot in Mandarin Chinese is grouped by two syllables from left to right and the stray syllable is attached to the neighboring foot when the number of syllables is odd. The theory of prosodic word explains properly what Chinese compounds come about, as first proposed in Shengli Feng. Given the unacceptable monosyllabic forms in prosodic parsing, it follows that trisyllabic units should be allowed by the grammar even if they are highly conditioned. Prosodic morphology in Chinese has its unique characteristics will make a deeper investigation into these issues. All of these forms produced in Chinese language are morphological results uniquely motivated by prosody.
