Diachronic Studies Of Chinese Word Frequency

The variation speed of vocabulary is faster than that of pronunciation and grammar in the evolution of language system.Word frequency,which means the occurrences of words in the specific text or corpus,can describe and display the situation of language evolution in more detail.From micro and macro aspects,this dissertation investigated some quantitative variations in the diachronic evolution of the Chinese language based on word frequency methods of quantitative linguistics.From the micro perspective,we carried out quantitative investigations on the diachronic change of some common pronouns since Song and Yuan Dynasties,on the basis of four equal-sized corpora of Chinese from Song and Yuan Dynasties,Ming Dynasty,Qing Dynasty and the contemporary age,respectively.The pronouns under investigation include personal pronouns:"Wo(?)","Wu(?)","Wo men(??)","An(?)","Zan(?)","Ni(?)","Ru(?)","Ni men(??)","Nin(?)",Ta(?),“Ta men(??)”;demonstrative pronouns:"Zhe ge(??)',Na ge(?A?)","Zhe xie(??)","Na xie(??)","Zhe li(??)","Na li(??)”;interrogative pronouns:"Shui(?)","Shen me(??)”,"Na ge(??)","Na xie(??)”,"Na li(??)”.The results showed that different pronouns,with respect to word frequency,had unique diachronic trends or changing degrees in each historical period.By statistical tests,quantification and sorting,we obtained more information about the quantitative trends of these pronouns,provided data to support existing viewpoints in the studies of the diachronic evolution of the Chinese language,and reinforced traditional methodology in terms of word frequency statistics.From the macro perspective,our investigations were divided into two parts:the first part quantitatively investigated into word frequencies in the Gospel of Mark at three different periods,namely,Classical Chinese(1855),Beijing Mandarin(1908)and Modern Mandarin(2010),attempting to shed some light on the evolution of the Chinese language over the last 160 years.With the evolution of Chinese,both the types and tokens diachronically increased,and some significant changes can be found in the high-frequency words,vocabulary richness,and the distribution of word classes.The syntactic structure has also become increasingly complex.In addition,although the length of words has increased diachronically,disyllabic words have not always been preponderant in Chinese after "The Opium War" of 1840-1842.The results showed that the complication is a crucial trend in the evolution process of Chinese.The second part investigated the genre development of modern Chinese novel since 1919 from the perspective of quantitative linguistics.We chose index a and lambda as our quantitative indicators,and then we tested their applicability to distinguish different genres of texts written in Chinese.The results showed that both may distinguish different genres of texts written in Chinese,and lambda performs better than index a.On this basis,we tested the genre of modern Chinese novel from 1919 to 2016,and the results showed that the genre of modern Chinese novel has no significant change since 1919.In conclusion,this dissertation is not only an attempt to study the diachronic evolution of the Chinese language through methods from quantitative linguistics,but also an exploratory investigation into quantitative variations of the diachronic evolution in Chinese.We expect that our study will shed some new light on the traditional field of the evolution of the Chinese language,and promote the development of this field.