Phonetic and Morphological Coding of Minimal Syntactic Units in Isolating Languages

Abstract

The problem of identifying minimal syntactically relevant intrasentential units in isolating languages has not been treated sufficiently thus far within morphological typology. Such units will be called here ‘syntactic words’ or ‘tagmons’. This article inquires into properties of tagmons and intends to provide some new insights into the structure of these units in Chinese and Vietnamese. Two kinds of tagmons of these languages, namely, affixal and adpositional, are subjected to examination in light of flection, paradigmatification, and linguistic codematics. This, in turn, together with the partisentential categorizability of tagmons justifies treating them as relatively coherent integral wholes capable of entering flectional relations which are controlled by intrasentential syntax. The codematic approach to tagmons reveals their morphological and phonological patterning.