ABSTRACT
The Foot Formation Rule established in Classical Chinese did not shape the modern vocabulary into all disyllabic forms completely. Monosyllabic words still have existed all along since Classical Chinese and in fact the status of monosyllabic morpheme has not changed even today. There has actually been a 'war' in the field of linguistics over the syllabic property of Chinese language/s: whether Mandarin Chinese is a monosyllabic language or a polysyllabic language. It has been widely recognized that morphemes in Chinese are overwhelmingly monosyllabic. However, there are neither generalizations nor linguistic representations to consider the monosyllabicity as a morphological constraint of the language. Although disyllabicity has been believed to be a strong tendency in Modern Chinese, anti-disyllabicity can also be observed in the language. Chou concludes that the operation of two-syllable words becoming one-syllable words, i.e., is a very active morphological process in many Mandarin dialects.
