Root merger in Chinese compounds *

.  Working on the computation of roots in Chinese compounds, this paper presents six major differences between the merger of roots in compound formation and the merger of elements in phrase structure formation: the existence of exocentric structures, the freedom of projectivity, the disappearance of subcategorization, the double licensing of formal features, the effect of Lexical Integrity in movement, and such an effect in pronominalization. All of these differences are accounted for by the hypothesis that roots do not have syntactic features. Moreover, this paper studies a case of merger level underspecification in languages that allow nouns and verbs to occur without any inflection: in the absence of a syntactic context, an isolated string of two elements can be ambiguous between the root‐merger that eventually gives rise to a verb and the merger of a verb and its object that gives rise to a VP.