Lexicalization is an important concept in Chinese, not only because it is an especially productive source of new words in the language, but also because it explains both the variable nature of the relationship between a word and its components and the general availability of word-internal information to the grammar at large. In the sections that follow, we will discuss lexicalization as a source of new words and as a way of explaining the nature of the component–word relationship.

Although the basic meaning of ‘lexicalization’ refers to something ‘becoming a word’, the term has been used by linguists to mean different things. Talmy (1985), for example, uses the term to focus on differences in concepts that happen to find instantiation at the word level in different languages. Another usage refers to abstract feature complexes leaving the realm of deep structure and taking on a concrete surface form (see, e.g., Sadock 1991: 36). Yet another common use of the term refers to the extent to which a complex linguistic form has taken on a non-compositional, idiomatic meaning. Harris and Campbell (1995) do not directly discuss lexicalization, but in their framework it would be considered a form of reanalysis in which the component that has been ‘recruited’ to become part of a word undergoes a change in cohesion, with the resulting formed word undergoing shifts in its constituency, hierarchical structure, category labeling and grammatical relations.