ABSTRACT
This chapter concerns the mechanism of compound word formation in Mandarin Chinese, proposing that compound words in Chinese must first be a prosodic word even if a prosodic word is not by necessity a compound word. According to the present theory, the tremendous disyllabic forms in Mandarin Chinese are one of the results of prosodic word formation. If a foot in Chinese is formed by at least two syllables, and each syllable is aligned with a morpheme or a word, then disyllabic feet are overwhelmingly formed by combination of two monosyllabic words or morphemes in the morphosyllabic system of Chinese. The two operational proposals, namely, P-Morphology and F-Morphology, each works efficiently for Chinese prosodic morphology even if the latter is simpler than the former. There are a few types of exceptions to the prosodic constraints on compound formation, and each type of exceptions consists of a sub-category of semantic field in the ordinary language.
