Quantitative Analysis Of Luo’s Simplification And Word Formation

The tables including "Table of frequently used words in modern Chinese", "The Syllabus of Graded Words and Characters for Chinese Proficiency", and "Code of Chinese graphic character set for information interchange-primary set" are considered to be the guiding character tables for first language instruction, teaching Chinese as a foreign language and testing, computer-based Chinese character coding field respectively. Comparing each two tables of the three above, the big differences were shown among them regarding the explanation and description of the Chinese character "luo". The research questions of this article are about what causes the differences of the three tables and how should people deal with the differences.There was a series of policies regarding Chinese character simplification, all of which include "luo", after the People’s Republic of China had been founded. To examine the character thoroughly, the simplification history of "luo" needs to be clarified and the standard form of the character at each stage should be addressed. As dictionaries and character tables are considered as the standardization of linguistic study and application, the study of "luo" should take the important dictionary and lexicon into consideration at first. The current study covered the subtle differences of "luo" among each edition of "Modern Chinese dictionary". The author also compared the forms and explanation of "luo" in different dictionaries at the same time frame. Different lexicons and dictionaries work for different fields so the focus of the explanation of "luo" was very different. The analysis displayed the process of simplification and the transformation of meaning of "luo" in a multi-perspective view.In the current research, the frequency and the mutual information of "luo" were analyzed by qualitative research method with the use of multiple corpus, including CCL of Peking University and corpus on-line of State Language Affairs Commission. Word frequency could reflect the active level of a word. The distribution of "luo" was intended to be shown based on the qualitative research of various related factors, including the word frequency, the part of speech, the word length, the time frame, words in common, words in exclusive etc. By using this method, the actual use of "luo" could be analyzed very objectively. The relevance of "luo" could be displayed by examining the two-character words and three-character words in corpus that containing "luo" based on the theory of mutual information."Modern Chinese dictionary" has collected different forms of the vocabulary "luosuo". There are many variant forms of "luo" in corpus. What are the variant forms of "luo"? What factors contribute to so many variant forms? Has the "Collection of the first group of variant forms" record all variant forms? These questions are the focus of the current study. Three words containing "luo" considered to be representative were addressed, including "luosuo’\"louluo’\"luozao". The vocabularies were examined with the use of corpus and the recommended forms in daily language use were discussed.