Multisyllabication and Phonological Simplification Throughout Chinese History

Most combinations of morphemes in early Chinese are generative. Therefore, the morpheme is the basic grammatical unit. In other words, morphemes and words are not distinguishable in early Chinese. In modern Chinese, however, combinations of morphemes may be generative or non-generative. Morphemes in non-generative combinations are not basic units but rather constituents of basic units.

From an evolutionary perspective, the basic units of the Chinese language developed from a single tier (morpheme/word) to a double tier (morpheme and word) constitution (Wang 2015). Interestingly, some researchers have correlated monosyllabic to multisyllabic¹ change, phonological simplification, and language contact. Scholars like Wang (1958) hypothesized that the latter two cause the syllabic change.

Conversely, Zhang (1939) argued that the simplification of phonology does not cause an increase of homophones if the vocabulary is limited. He suggested that the great lexical expansion during the Western Zhou dynasty and the Spring and Autumn period activated multisyllabication. Additionally, Lü (1963) supported this theory based on twentieth-century observations of a significant increase of disyllabic words that were void of preceding phonological changes.

Commenting on the above theories, Sampson (2015) points out that “if it should be that the shift from monosyllabic to disyllabic words took place before the contrast-eliminating sound changes, those changes would not have created much homophony between words when they occurred, so Chinese would not be an exception to the generalization about homophony avoidance” (emphasis his). However, he rejects this possibility based on indirect evidence (for more details please refer to his paper). One example is that the type of synonym compounding seems to be ‘pointlessly redundant’ if it arose earlier than phonological mergers.

In fact, synonym compounding contributed greatly in at least two aspects of expression. First, synonyms often have several meanings, yet compounds are monosemous. According to Wang (2000), the constituents of the six examples in Sampson’s paper have the following numbers of meanings.

1	2	3	5	3	2	6	2	2	5	2	1

Only two of the twelve characters are monosemous, while the others are polysemous. For instance, the character péng () has six meanings. However, all of the six compounds are monosemous. Therefore, such compounding is a means of de-ambiguity.

Second, compounding synonyms is a means of semantic generation. For instance, péng () and yŏu () indicate different types of friends. The former indicates friends sharing the same teacher, while the latter means friends sharing the same ideal.² The compound generalizes the meaning as ‘friend’. The characters fén () and mù () indicate different kinds of tombs. The former indicates a mounded tomb, while the latter means a flat tomb. The compound is generalized as ‘tomb’. These two functions—de-ambiguity and generalization—are certainly important for linguistic expression.

In Sampson’s words, “Nevertheless, it seems unlikely that in general the shift to disyllabic vocabulary could have preceded the loss of phonemic contrasts.” Below, I provide direct evidence to show the likelihood that a shift from monosyllabic to disyllabic words took place before the loss of phonemic contrasts. The data of multisyllabic words in Chinese across time are taken from Li (2011). Only those documents with confirmed dates have been selected. The percentages of multisyllabic words (shown below as % of MW) in those documents are listed in the following tables.

Table 1.

Multisyllabic Words in Old Chinese

Table 2.

Multisyllabic Words in Middle Chinese

Table 3.

Multisyllabic Words in Chinese since the Tang Dynasty

The data in the three tables may be summarized in the following diagram. Y-axis indicates the proportion of multisyllabic words, while X-axis indicates years before present. For standard dating purposes, 2000 CE is taken as the present.

Figure 1.

Rise of Multisyllabic Words in Chinese

Figure 1 shows that multisyllabic words have increased continuously with time. There were two significant leaps during this process. The first dramatic increase occurred from 2400 BP to 2200 BP—the Warring States period...