Word formation in Old Chinese William H. Baxter and Laurent Sagart 1. Preliminaries Chr Jim guoyimhua! Chuiin yr xrzhuiinghua Quem guo tingzihua! Z6u Iii. jiaochehua! 'State-banquet-ization of meals! Western-suit-ization of clothing! Pavilion-ization of the whole country! Sedan-ization of transportation!' - the Four (Modern-)izations according to Meng Qinglin, Chinese mental patient (Montagnon 1988) The present paper illustrates some of the major known morphological processes of Old Chinese - roughly, the language of the Chinese classical texts of the Zh6u mi dynasty (11 th - 3rd centuries B.C.E.). To speak of morphological processes in Old Chinese may surprise some readers, for there is a widespread belief that early Chinese had only impoverished morphology if it had any at all. Even such an insightful scholar as A. C. Graham, though refuting some of the more outlandish claims which have been made about the Chinese language, speaks of the "uniform and unchanging monosyllables" of Classical Chinese, "organized by syntax alone" (Graham 1989: 390, 403).1 For the Classical Chinese written language as used in recent centuries, this argument perhaps has some validity: how could a dead language - dead in its spoken form, at any rate - have a productive morphology anyway? But the Old Chinese we speak of here was not dead, and there is ample evidence, as we shall see, that it had various prefixes, suffixes, and other morphological processes, some still productive at the time the From Packard, Jerome (ed.) 1997. New approaches to Chinese word formation, 35–76. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. 35