section_path: Grammar
section_name: Grammar
paragraph_text: Grammar
  
  Chinese is often described as a 'monosyllabic' language. However, this is only partially correct. It is largely accurate when describing Old and Middle Chinese; in Classical Chinese, around 90% of words consist of a single character that corresponds one-to-one with a morpheme, the smallest unit of meaning in a language. In modern varieties, it usually remains the case that morphemes are monosyllabic—in contrast, English has many multi-syllable morphemes, both bound and free, such as 'seven', 'elephant', 'para-' and '-able'. Some of the more conservative modern varieties, usually found in the south, have largely monosyllabic words, especially with basic vocabulary. However, most nouns, adjectives, and verbs in modern Mandarin are disyllabic. A significant cause of this is phonetic erosion: sound changes over time have steadily reduced the number of possible syllables in the language's inventory. In modern Mandarin, there are only around 1,200 possible syllables, including the tonal distinctions, compared with about 5,000 in Vietnamese (still a largely monosyllabic language), and over 8,000 in English.
  
  Most modern varieties tend to form new words through polysyllabic compounds. In some cases, monosyllabic words have become disyllabic formed from different characters without the use of compounding, as in 窟窿; kūlong from 孔; kǒng; this is especially common in Jin varieties. This phonological collapse has led to a corresponding increase in the number of homophones. As an example, the small Langenscheidt Pocket Chinese Dictionary lists six words that are commonly pronounced as shí in Standard Chinese:
  
  In modern spoken Mandarin, however, tremendous ambiguity would result if all of these words could be used as-is. The 20th century Yuen Ren Chao poem Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den exploits this, consisting of 92 characters all pronounced shi. As such, most of these words have been replaced in speech, if not in writing, with less ambiguous disyllabic compounds. Only the first one, 十, normally appears in monosyllabic form in spoken Mandarin; the rest are normally used in the polysyllabic forms of
  
  respectively. In each, the homophone was disambiguated by the addition of another morpheme, typically either a near-synonym or some sort of generic word (e.g. 'head', 'thing'), the purpose of which is to indicate which of the possible meanings of the other, homophonic syllable is specifically meant.
  
  However, when one of the above words forms part of a compound, the disambiguating syllable is generally dropped and the resulting word is still disyllabic. For example, 石; shí alone, and not 石头; 石頭; shítou, appears in compounds as meaning 'stone' such as 石膏; shígāo; ' plaster ', 石灰; shíhuī; ' lime ', 石窟; shíkū; ' grotto ', 石英; ' quartz ', and 石油; shíyóu; ' petroleum '. Although many single-syllable morphemes (字; zì) can stand alone as individual words, they more often than not form multi-syllable compounds known as 词; 詞; cí, which more closely resembles the traditional Western notion of a word. A Chinese cí can consist of more than one character–morpheme, usually two, but there can be three or more.
  
  Examples of Chinese words of more than two syllables include 汉堡包; 漢堡包; hànbǎobāo; ' hamburger ', 守门员; 守門員; shǒuményuán; ' goalkeeper ', and 电子邮件; 電子郵件; diànzǐyóujiàn; ' e-mail '.
  
  All varieties of modern Chinese are analytic languages: they depend on syntax (word order and sentence structure), rather than inflectional morphology (changes in the form of a word), to indicate a word's function within a sentence. In other words, Chinese has very few grammatical inflections —it possesses no tenses, no voices, no grammatical number, and only a few articles. They make heavy use of grammatical particles to indicate aspect and mood. In Mandarin, this involves the use of particles such as 了; le; ' PFV ', 还; 還; hái; ' still ', and 已经; 已經; yǐjīng; ' already '.
  
  Chinese has a subject–verb–object word order, and like many other languages of East Asia, makes frequent use of the topic–comment construction to form sentences. Chinese also has an extensive system of classifiers and measure words, another trait shared with neighboring languages such as Japanese and Korean. Other notable grammatical features common to all the spoken varieties of Chinese include the use of serial verb construction, pronoun dropping, and the related subject dropping. Although the grammars of the spoken varieties share many traits, they do possess differences.