This book is divided into four sections. The first section introduces the theoretical foundation for the studies of Chinese prosodic words, including the prosodic structure, prosodic hierarchy, and the theory of prosodic morphology with prosodic words as the template. The second section elaborates on the operation of Chinese prosodic morphology, proposing the “Template Rule of Chinese Prosodic Words” and analyzing various phenomena of compound words in Chinese based on this rule. The third section mainly talks about Chinese “word sense” as well as the relationship between prosodic words and the word sense. The fourth section makes some additional remarks on questions like “whether tone sandhi directly points to prosodic words”, “which methods need special attention in the study of prosodic grammar” and “the interaction between prosodic morphology and prosodic syntax”.
Pei Yulai is an associate professor in the School of Sinology, Xi’an International Studies University, and a Ph.D. in Linguistics and Applied Linguistics from Peking University, whose research interests focus on Chinese prosodic grammar and Chinese language teaching, etc. Mr. Pei has hosted several projects of social sciences and educational reform supported by national and provincial funds, and has won an award of Outstanding Research Achievement of Philosophy and Social Sciences of Shaanxi Province. His works include the academic book The Relation Between POS-NOS and Prosodic Structure’s Production and a number of papers published in Journal of Chinese Linguistics, Contemporary Linguistics, Linguistic Sciences, Chinese Language Learning and other journals.