On the Positions of Character, Word and Morpheme in the Chinese Language

Zi (Character) is special level in the Chinese written language which was the focus of study in traditional Chinese linguistics in the past. However, the development of the Chinese language requires the introduction of another two concepts: word morpheme. Ancient Chinese is monosyllabic characterstandard language, which is basically the unity of character, word morpheme with only few exceptions. Modern Chinese, on the contrary, is a wordstandard language whose main structural unit is polysyllabic words in which characters, words morphemes are different from each other. The characterstandard theory, which is not fit for modern Chinese, is simply regression to ancient Chinese. The concepts of and character group in this theory are misleading, they are not consistent with the nice name standard stipulated by Xunzi. The best choice is to distinguish character, word morpheme from each other in terms of their functions. Our theory of the Chinese language should be consistent with the reality of the language modern linguistic theories.