Streszczenie
The problem of identifying minimal syntactically relevant intrasentential units in
isolating languages has not been treated sufficiently thus far within morphological typology.
Such units will be called here ‘syntactic words’ or ‘tagmons’. This article inquires into
properties of tagmons and intends to provide some new insights into the structure of these
units in Chinese and Vietnamese. Two kinds of tagmons of these languages, namely, affixal
and adpositional, are subjected to examination in light of flection, paradigmatification, and
linguistic codematics. This, in turn, together with the partisentential categorizability of
tagmons justifies treating them as relatively coherent integral wholes capable of entering
flectional relations which are controlled by intrasentential syntax. The codematic approach
to tagmons reveals their morphological and phonological patterning.