Three Forms of the Joint Compounds in Chinese

The joint compound is composed of coordinating morphemes with similar or opposite meanings. When you study Chinese at school, teacher may tell you that each morpheme has no difference in the status and importance. More importantly, the parts of speech of the two morphemes are the same. It usually the noun, verb or adjective, and the meanings of each morpheme is complementary with another. If you study Chinese, you should know there are three forms in this kind of words. Learners should know something about them if they want to learn better.

The first form is the joint compounds consist of two morphemes with the similar meaning. As the meanings of the two morphemes are similar, the foreigners who learn in Chinese courses in China can guess the meaning of anther morphine if they know one like 学习. The second form is the morphemes with opposite meanings. If the students know the meanings of these two morphemes, teachers can lead them to know the whole meaning when they study Chinese, for instance, 大小. The last one is also opposite, but we just take the meaning of one morpheme as the whole meaning like忘记.