Quantitative Studies Of Chinese Word Length

Word is the basic unit in human languages.Among its many properties,"length" of word,or word length,bears the features as being the most fundamental lexical structure and the easiest to be quantified for more depth study.In this dissertation,quantitative linguistic methods are adopted to explore word length in Chinese from both the synchronic and diachronic perspectives.Chapter 1 and 2 introduce quantitative linguistic theories and methods to investigate word lengths.In quantitative linguistics,five properties can be captured by quantitative means for almost every language structural property:"frequency distribution","sequence distributio","synergetic relations","hierarchical relations" and "historical evolutions".We mainly focus on "frequency distributions" and "sequence distributions",but the other three are also discussed.The "frequency distribution" is explored in Chapter 3 and 4.Chapter 3 explores word length from the synchronic perspective,with three problems to elaborate concerning spoken and written Chinese respectively:the most appropriate measurement unit of word length,the differences on their word length distribution,and the hierarchical position of Chinese word in language units.We yield the following results:Firstly,syllable and component are the most appropriate measurement units in spoken and written Chinese respectively;Secondly,there is a significant difference of word length distributions between spoken and written Chinese,especially in short word length distributions;Thirdly,"word-component-stroke" is the Menzerathian hierarchy in written Chinese;Fourthly,there is an interactive effect between spoken and written Chinese,and the later is more likely to be affected by the former.Chapter 4 explores word length distributions from the diachronic perspective.In this Chapter,we used different quantitative methods to explore the evolution of word length distributions based on two historical corpora.Both results show that there is a significant rule manifested in the evolution of word length,that is,the increase of mean word length and the "bell shape" trend of Chinese word length distributions.What is more,the investigations of the synergetic relations between word length and other properties,such as word frequency,show that word length does not evolve alone,but as a self-organizing system---word length and word frequency both depend on each other and co-evolve as a synergetic system,which cause the evolution in the lexical system as a whole.The evolution of word length is controlled under the "principle of least effort",which promotes the efficiency of human language communications.Chapter 5 explores "sequence distributions" of Chinese word length from both the synchronic and diachronic perspective.The results are as follows:both spoken and written Chinese have the same distribution model in terms of word length motifs;the evolutionary trend of word length motifs are very similar to the case of word length,which indicates that word length motifs probably,to some extent,are inherited from word length distribution.We turn to word length entropies in order to have a deep probe into word length motif evolutions.The analyses of N-gram word length entropy show that it is mainly influenced by word length distributions;in addition,the sequence of word length tend to be more correlated in the longer range correlations,and the increase of motif distribution entropy indicate that the word length motifs are getting fixed patterns.In conclusion,guided by quantitative linguistic theories,this dissertation used the latest quantitative methods to investigate "frequency distributions" and "sequence distributions" of Chinese word length from both the synchronic and diachronic perspective.We expect that this study will on one hand promote the development of quantitative linguistics,especially synergetic linguistics,and on the other hand contributes to the development of Chinese language sciences,finding the innate structural and evolutionary rule of Chinese language.