Survey of Mandarin Chinese Morphology

The Mandarin Chinese language (and all other dialects of Chinese including Cantonese) lacks any kind of overt inflectional morphology. In Chinese, words are typically formed by one or two written characters. Each character is monosyllabic and can usually stand alone as an unbound morpheme, making inflectional changes more or less impossible. As a result, the Chinese language family has no method of overtly expressing tense, number, gender, etc. Instead of inflectional changes, Chinese uses context, additional particles, word order, and other lexical means to convey covert inflectional transparency. What follows are a few examples of these functions.

Timeframes and the le (了)particle. Since Chinese is a highly analytic language, other strategies are used in order to convey tense. The easiest way to do this is to indicate a timeframe for the action in question. For example: 他去北京 Tā qù běijīng He go Beijing. (He goes to Beijing / He is going to Beijing) vs. 他昨天去北京 Tā zuótiān qù běijīng He yesterday go Beijing. (Yesterday he went to Beijing).

The addition of ‘yesterday’ implies that the action has already happened; no conjugation of the verb is required.

Chinese has a different approach for indicating completeness or change of state of a past action, by adding the ‘le’ particle to the end of the action: 我吃饭 Wǒ chī fàn I eat (am eating) [rice]. vs. 我吃饭了 Wǒ chī fàn le I ate [rice] part.[and am finished].

Word Order Word order is another strategy used instead of inflectional morphology. Instead of using an accusative form of the first person singular nominative, word order is simply switched:

我给了他一本原版毛主席语录 Wǒ gěile tā yī běn yuánbǎn máo zhǔxí yǔlù I gave him an original copy [of] Mao’s Little Red Book vs. 他给了我一本原版毛主席语录 Tā gěile wǒ yī běn yuánbǎn máo zhǔxí yǔlù He gave me an original copy [of] Mao’s Little Red Book Instead of changing forms (in English ‘I’ becomes ‘me’ and ‘him’ becomes he), word order is