Chapter 2 Theoretical Background: Compounding Morphology and Approaches to Processing Morphologically Complex Words

This chapter is aimed at providing the theoretical background for the present study. It starts with an introduction to the linguistic properties of compound words in Section 2.1, where the differences between the compounding morphology and the inflectional and derivational morphology are discussed and the approaches to classifying compound words are enumerated. Then, as the book is a cross-language study targeted at Chinese EFL learners, Section 2.2 is particularly devoted to the description of Chinese compound words. Section 2.3 is the key part of this chapter in that it presents the theoretical accounts of the processing of morphologically complex words. Specifically, the most representative models in this field, namely the Decomposition Model, the Full-listing Model, the Connectionist Model and the Dual-route Models are discussed. Finally, an interim summary is made in Section 2.4.