This volume examines the composition of multisyllabic words in Chinese, revealing a wealth of word formation complexity in a language too often characterized as morphologically impoverished. The collection of articles is broad both in theoretical approach and chronology, ranging in topic from the origin and development of bisyllabic words in Ancient Chinese to the argument structure and theta-assignment principles in Modern Mandarin compounds. The wide range of word formation phenomena in Chinese is demonstrated with examples from dialects as diverse as Mandarin, Shanghai, Hakka and Taiwanese, as the reader is offered a panoply of new ideas on Chinese words and their structure. The book presents novel insights into the formation of complex words in both the ancient and modern language, offering contemporary linguistic analyses of word structure unfettered by the myth that wordhood in Chinese is somehow equated with the written Chinese character. This work demonstrates the breadth of current scholarship in the study of Chinese morphology and is certain to pose a challenge to traditional conceptions of word structure in Chinese linguistics.