Quantitative Studies On Chinese New Poetry

Chinese new poetry is one of the most special genres in Chinese literature,which replaces jinti(modern-style)poetry and occupies a dominant role in poetry circles from Tang dynasty up till now.However,the distinguishing properties of new poetry are not clear yet.The exploration to the answer of the question that "what is new poetry" is still on the way as well.The present paper collects 480 samples,and then compares them with three parallel text groups:100 prose,100 jinti poetry,100 Taiwan new poetry and 100 translated poetry,with the aim to figure out the features of new poetry texts from the perspective of quantitative linguistics.The paper mainly focuses on phonemes and words' ranks,frequencies and probabilities of the selected texts,to be specific,n-gram,high frequency words,vocabulary richness,golden section,etc.The main quantitative approaches applied are multi-dimensional analysis,correlation coefficient analysis,regression analysis,and so forth.The study of phonemes focuses on the rhymes of all the poetry texts,except prose texts.In comparison with jinti poetry,it has been observed in the selected new poetry corpora that there is a growing descending emphasis on rhymes in these poetic texts,which is one of the traditional means to achieve aesthetic values of poetries.This tendency outstands itself especially from two time period:the one from 1920s to 1940s,and the other from 1950s to 2000s.This gradually deemphasis on the use of rhymes has also been found in new poetry,Taiwan new poetry and translated poetry texts,is sharply decreased,The study of words pays attention to the ranks,frequencies and probabilities of word forms,word classes and adnominals in the selected corpora,with special emphasis on the quantitative dimensions of the following aspects:high frequency words,vocabulary richness,the distribution of word frequencies and word class frequencies,the frequencies of word classes and adnominals,and so forth.High frequency words in prose texts distribute discretely.But,in jinti poetry texts and new poetry texts,high frequency words always concentrated on meanings of some kind.For instance,high frequency words in jinti poetry mainly concerns about the"nature sight",but "time and universe" in new poetry in the 1980s.The vocabulary richness in new poetry is much higher than that of prose texts,but much lower than that of jinti poetry.The distribution of word frequencies and word class frequencies both suggest that all of the prose texts are self-organized and heterogeneous.Most of the new poetry texts are self-organized,despite the fact that a large number of these texts are homogeneous.Moreover,jinti poetry texts seem to be tightly controlled by poets,but not self-organized.The result of the analysis on the frequencies of word classes and adnominals in the corpora confirms that there is a difference between the new poetry texts and prose texts,and between the new poetry texts and jinti poetry texts as well.The paper concludes at last that there exist differences among genres of Chinese new poetry,jinti poetry and prose,but some similarities among the genres of Chinese new poetry,Taiwan new poetry and translated poetry,which has been manifested by quantitative features of texts from different times,regions and authors.This paper has discovered some essential properties which can distinguish the genre of Chinese new poetry,which suggests that quantitative approaches could be great helpful for literature studies.