The Irregular Compound Words in Chinese Vocabulary ——A Special Lexical Configuration

The irregular compound words result from the diachronic evolution of Chinese vocabulary that are based on some morphemes but can not be analyzed by structure. There are 4 types of irregular compound words: 1) 2 components that belong to 2 levels of sentence will form a word if they are always used together. 2) Some phones or syllables from an everyday expression form a new shortened synonym. 3) The remaining parts of a familiar group express the meaning of the word that has been omitted from the group. 4) A morpheme of a word is replaced by a non correlative morpheme to form a new word that correlates with the former word.