Abstract:
This paper discussed the syntactic tendencies of Chinese morphemes and their influences on the word class judgment of semantic-phonetic compound characters. Study 1 made statistics of the semantic-phonetic compound characters in 2 500 commonly used Chinese characters. The results showed that most morphemes have obvious syntactic tendencies. Study 2 investigated the consistency between subjective evaluation results and objective statistical results. The results showed that there was a significant correlation between Chinese native speakers' evaluation and the objective statistical results, indicating that the syntactic tendencies of Chinese morphemes have psychological reality. Study 3 manipulated the levels of syntactic tendencies of Chinese morphemes, and found that they affected the classification of Chinese verbs and nouns by the native speakers. To be specific, the characters with high syntactic tendency were identified as verbs or nouns more quickly than the ones with low syntactic tendency, which indicates that the syntactic tendencies of Chinese morphemes affect the extraction of syntactic meanings of Chinese characters.