[1] In modern Chinese, a character may represent a word, a morpheme in compound word, or a meaningless syllable combined with other syllables or characters to form a morpheme.
Some words are multi-syllabic transliterations of names and loanwords where the individual characters do not carry meaning, such as 牛頓 ("Niúdùn" Newton), 紐約 ("Niǔ Yuē" New York), 沙發 ("shā fā" Sofa) and 奧林匹克 ("Àolínpǐkè" Olympics).
For example: "馬" (horse) is a morpheme in "賽馬" (horse racing) and "馬路" (street, road, literally "horse road") and contributes a meaning, but is not a morpheme in "羅馬" (Rome), "奧巴馬" (Obama), and "馬拉松" (marathon) and has no meaning of its own in those words, only contributing its sound.
More details can be found in the table below:[6] When a word is created, it is often assigned a single meaning.
The meaning added through the loan of homonymous sounds is the phonetic-loan meaning (simplified Chinese: 假借义; traditional Chinese: 假借義; pinyin: jiǎ jiè yì).
[9] Generally, "面" is not used alone in Standard Chinese, but only appears in multi-character words.
"臉" and "面" themselves form the compound word "臉面" (face, self respect).
[10] Two distinct situations can be observed: one is the increase or decrease in meaning of the morphemes recorded in Chinese characters.
[11] For example: The other is the increase or decrease in the number of meanings of a character due to combination or differentiation.
The aforementioned types of word formation may combine further: Professor Huang Changning and his team adopted a simple and effective method for corpus annotation.