The derivative structure of Mandarin disyllabic verbs

Abstract

With detailed examinations of the four characters that are known to be the most commonly used verb suffixes (huà, dé/de, yú and yĭ) and their correlative implementations in Mandarin disyllabic verbs, this article discusses the traits of the derivative structure that are formed with a content morpheme and a suffix. The observations show that not all of the disyllabic words where these characters are the second morpheme are derivative verbs. On the other hand, being the derivational components of the disyllabic verbs, these suffixes all have their individual qualities that lead to their non-uniformed morphological representations.