Abstract In this paper we study Mandarin nominals formed with more than one morpheme, which are ambiguous between words and phrases due to the lack of morphological evidence. The proposed analysis is based on the exocentric labelling model in Adger (2013. A syntax of substance . Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press), which focuses on categorial labels and their transition relations. We propose that any item from the lexicon which is not a label enters the syntactic derivation as a category-less root, and nominals are those which get a label N via Merge as the derivation continues. A root can Merge with itself and get the label N through Root Labelling. Alternatively, a structure can be assigned the label N when the Label Transition Functions allow both of its daughters to change its current label to N. These two operations decide the legitimate pairs in Merge. The analysis shows that we have only three types of complex nominals in Mandarin: A-N and N-N, which are complex in syntactic structure, and the non-compositional ones, which are complex only in syllabic structure. Finally, there are no V-N nominals in Mandarin, as those which appear to be so are all non-compositional.
Chen et al. (2026) studied this question.