A Review of Shi Guangan's Endocentric and Exocentric Constructions in Contemporary Chinese

The author agrees with Shi's criticism (1988) of Zhu's revision (1985a) of Bloomfield's definition of endocentric construction which tries to solve the problem that zhebenshu de chuban 'the publication of the book' in Chinese violates the definition. Zhu's revision is unsuccessful and brings about further contradictions and inconsistencies. The author emphasizes the importance of Shi's critique and opposes settling the problem by leaving it unsettled. Shi (1988) proposes to return to the nominalization solution or the gerund solution, both of which however will also get nowhere in the author's opinion. The author instead suggests the adoption of Shen's theory (2016) of super-noun category and the idea of 'isomorphism in a broad sense'. This review is also a response to Lu's criticism (2022) of the super-noun theory.