Abstract
Polysyllabic (i.e. having two or more syllables) words account for a major part in the modern Chinese vocabulary. In Chinese, polysyllabic words are more than a collection of syllables; they are a combination of meaningful morphemes and thus a profound manifestation of the phonetic, semantic and syntactic laws in Chinese language. This study focuses on the polysyllabic words in the Comprehensive Dictionary of Chinese Words and examines the quantitative relation between their number of senses and word length. The data indicate that when the word length increases, the number of senses decreases, and monosemous words are in majority. The negative correlation between number of senses and word length of Chinese polysyllabic words is due to the restriction of word meaning caused by involved morphemic meanings. This reveals a significant difference between Chinese and typical Western languages from a quantitative perspective.
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