ABSTRACT
This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the key concepts discussed in the preceding chapters of this book. The book discusses various aspects of prosodic morphology in Chinese, from Archaic moraic foot formation to Medieval disyllabicity, from prosodic word formation in Medieval Chinese to prosodic word compounding in Modern Chinese, and finally arrives at prosodic register grammar. It starts from ancient prosody not only because the disyllabic foot formation results from the change of moraic foot formation but also because ancient scholars had noticed the linguistic phenomena of prosody long before. In the past several decades, a large number of Chinese prosodic morphological phenomena have been explored and many new discoveries that merit attention from general linguistics are emerging. Given prosodically based study of lexicon, morphology, syntax, literature and the way of thinking in both Ancient and Modern Chinese, it is not exaggerated to say that to understand Chinese is essentially to comprehend its prosody.
