Chinese is widely regarded as a textbook example of the isolating language type, with little morphology and few affixes (Sagart 2004:123). Moreover, the relationship between form and meaning in Chinese morphology is said to be very straightforward, as it has clearly defined morpheme boundaries, no cumulative exponence and no allomorphy or suppletion, i.e., morphemes usually have a single phonological form (see Packard 2006).

This, however, does no…