ABSTRACT
This chapter demonstrates that a Chinese noun may vary significantly in forms and meanings as is understood in construction grammar. It focuses on how conceptual categories are lexicalized into simplex, and other complex, nouns and how they distinguish from a phrase, though not in a binary fashion, in a coherent and principled way. The chapter discusses the linguistic, and some theoretical, and various proposals in the available literature on the morphology of Chinese nominals. It provides the nominal compounds through the form and meaning pairings in terms of nouns, word-like compounds, and phrase-like compounds. The chapter also discusses the systematic distributions of the Chinese nominals with a lexical/grammatical continuum. According to the ways that Chinese complex nouns are used, they can be categorized into three kinds: words, word-like compounds, and phrase-like compounds. However, it is necessary to note that Chinese set expressions can be word-like or phrase-like as well.
