Sino-Vietnamese morphemes: Their grammatical behaviour & implications for semantics and phonetics

This paper shows that Sino-Vietnamese morphemes combine not only with other Sino-Vietnamese morphemes but also with non-Sino-Vietnamese morphemes, such as native Vietnamese and even Indo-European elements, particularly French loanwords.This phenomenon is not unique to Vietnamese: similar hybrid words can also be found in other Sino-xenic languages (Japanese and Korean) as well as Indo-European languages.In noun phrases where the Sino-Vietnamese morpheme serves as the head, the Chinese grammatical rule [modifier + head] tends to predominate, but in some cases, Vietnamese follows its native grammatical structure [head + modifier].This grammatical behaviour has semantic consequences.Indeed, the criterion [ interchangeable in all contexts], used to classify synonyms into "absolute synonyms" and "non-absolute synonyms," proves ineffective, because free Sino-Vietnamese morphemes can combine with both other Sino-Vietnamese morphemes and native Vietnamese ones, whereas their native Vietnamese synonyms generally cannot combine with Sino-Vietnamese morphemes.The differences in combinability of Sino-Vietnamese morphemes lead to semantic consequences in connection with phonology: Sino-Vietnamese morphemes with very low productivity tend to be assimilated into (near-)homophonous morphemes -whether Sino-Vietnamese or non-Sino-Vietnamese -with higher productivity.