Neoclassical compounding beyond Europe: the case of East Asia

In this paper, we shall propose an extension of the notion of ‘neoclassical com- pound’ to the morphology of Modern Mandarin Chinese and other languages of East Asia. For our discussion, two related phenomena are of particular interest: the existence in Chinese of synonymic morphemes, one of which is bound and has a classical flavour, while the other is free and has a more ‘modern’ connotation (e.g. 食 shí ‘eat’ and 飲 yǐn ‘drink’ vs. 吃 chī and 喝 hē), and the diffusion of Chinese morphemes as bound word constituents in languages of East Asia which have come under the influence of Chinese culture, i.e. Vietnamese, Japanese, Korean, as well as in some Chinese dialects.