A paradox: Merger or compounding — which comes first?
Comments on Geoffrey Sampson’s article
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< Matthew Y Chen

Abstract 摘要
Geoffrey Sampson’s paper highlights a peculiar fact about Chinese: the prevalence of coordinate compounds consisting of two near-synonyms. To illustrate this point, in a randomly chosen article of about 670 characters, I found as many as 74 such tokens, depending on how loosely one defines “near-synonyums”. That is almost 1/5 of the running text! Here are some instances: 稳定，民族，确定，捍卫，控制，完整，保持，良好，混乱，破坏，快速，岛屿，基础，使用，武力，etc.1 Word-formation of this type is rare, for example in English. The closest examples I can think of are expressions like first and foremost, rules and regulations, and twists and turns.