The synergetic relationship between morphology and meaning in Chinese has yet to be investigated. Based on the Lancaster Corpus of Mandarin Chinese, we studied the synergetic relationship between the structural complexity of words (SCW) and polysemy, and identified a suitable descriptive model. The distinguishing effects of model parameters on different genres were also examined. The results yield, first, that there is an inverse correlation between SCW and polysemy (but the increase of one will not cause the infinite reduction of the other), and the model y = Ax−be−cx can describe this relationship well. Second, parameters a and c reflect the differences in lexical forms between ‘narrative’ and ‘expository’ texts; parameter b reflects the differences in meaning clarity between the two types of texts. Besides revealing the interaction mechanism between lexical forms and meanings, our research also provides references for language teaching and automatic genre identification.