A Diachronometric Study Of The Text Of The People's Daily

People’s Daily was founded in 1946 and has been published continuously till now.It is a typical representative of Chinese news text and has incomparable authority and influence.At the same time,the characteristics of its long-term distribution can also provide a stable research sample for the diachronic study of modern Chinese written language.In this paper,we use stratified sampling method to sample the news reports of people’s daily from 1946 to 2016.Based on the relevant concepts and theories of quantitative linguistics and statistics,this paper makes a diachronic analysis of the corpus samples at various levels by using modern scientific tools and methods.In terms of word length features,we find that there is a tendency of polysyllabic in the use of sample word length.In terms of lexical richness,this paper examines the relevant features,such as type/token ratios,text entropy,lexical density and repetition rate.In terms of topic concentration,this paper finds that there are differences in topic expression in corpus samples,and also conducts a special study on topic words.In terms of high frequency words,this paper finds that there is a connection between the distribution of parts of speech and narrative strategies.In all aspects of the research,this paper also according to the measurement characteristics of the numerical value of the diachronic differences and trends of change were carried out by stages.It is found that the founding of new China in1949 and the reform and opening-up in 1978 are important nodes in the diachronic trend of corpus samples,which proves the viewpoint of "three periods" in the study of modern Chinese staging.