How to deal with Chinese character-word mystery in terms of (western) linguistic morphology?
1. In principle, each character stands for a morpheme (morpho-semantically). Exceptions are 葡萄、踟躕、... where two characters are born to tie together.
In these cases, a morpheme 葡萄 is represented by two characters 葡 and 萄, respectively.
2. The types of morphemes that the character stand for vary. E.g., 今: bound root morpheme; 者: bound suffix; 打: free root morpheme; 了: inflectional
morpheme (?).
3. A Chinese word is composed of some possible combinations like (1) morpheme + word 辛苦 (2) word + morpheme 打字機 (3) morpheme 喝 (4)
morpheme + morpheme 前進
4. A Chinese compound word is composed of (at least) two words/compound words. Formally, (1) w1+w2+.....電腦 (2) cw1+w2 ...電腦螢幕
5. Criteria of the judgement of Chinese wordhood:
5.1 Stand alone in the similar semantic context
5.2 Psychological reality
5.3 Proper name and fixed expressions
6. Operation:
7. Dubious/counter-intuitive cases: 腳踏車 a word or a compound word?
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