A Quantitative Research On The Lexical System Of Zhuang Language

As the most basic unit of human language,words are usually the beginning of the process of the acquisition,learning or research of certain language.Thus,in the field of language research,achievements in the lexical aspects are usually richer than those in others.Zhuang language is the ethnic minority language with the most native speakers in China,and people have studied it for nearly 100 years.Based on related theories of quantitative linguistics,this study conducts a comprehensive quantitative research on the lexical system of the language.Chapter 1 summarizes the current situation of Zhuang language research at home and abroad and points out the three aspects that need further improvement,proposes three new possible perspectives for the research of Zhuang language and puts forward three main research questions for the study.Chapter 2 introduces the research corpus and methods,as well as the quantitative indexes and data-generated tools applied in this study.The word frequency distribution features of Zhuang are investigated in Chapter3.The results show that Zhuang language shares some common features with Chinese and English in word frequency distribution: they all follow the “Principle of Least Effort”;the values of the “h-point” and “a-index” derived from the self-built Zhuang corpus show that and the position of Zhuang on the analytism-synthetism continuum proposed by Popescu is close to those of the Austronesian language family.These typological features may also provide an objective basis for the language family affiliation of Zhuang.Chapter 4 discusses the quantitative characteristics of word length distribution in Zhuang language in details.In this part,we first comprehensively analyze the word length distribution of three text types of Zhuang language,including the mixed text in the self-built Zhuang corpus,the texts of six different genres and the homogenous continuous long texts.The results show that the dynamic and static word length distribution of all three Zhuang text types investigated can be described by the Positive Cohen-Poisson model when the word length is measured by the syllable numbers;while they do not follow any distribution model when the word length is measured in terms of the letter numbers.However,the WLDs of all the three Zhuang text types investigated can be described by the Zipf-Alekseev function either in terms of syllable or letter numbers.Then,the study of the relationship between the parameters a and b in the Zipf-Alekseev model shows that the self-organizing regularity observed in other languages also exists in Zhuang.Moreover,the research on the WLDs of different Zhuang genres indicates that WLD may not be a sensitive index in distinguishing different Zhuang genres but an effective one in distinguishing different Zhuang styles(spoken or written).We then study the word length-frequency relationship of Zhuang based on four text types of the language,namely,the mixed texts from the self-built big corpus,the texts of different genres,the continuous long texts,and the independent short texts.The results show: when the word length is measured by syllable numbers,Zhuang word length is influenced by its frequency,which can be explained by the “Principle of Least Effort” and thus follow the law of lexical synergetic subsystem in synergetic linguistics;but in the case when the word length is measured in terms of letter numbers,the word length-frequency relationship of the above-mentioned four text types cannot be described by the law function,which may demonstrate that syllable is a appropriate measuring unit of the word length of Zhuang language.Chapter 5 focuses on the quantitative characteristics of common words in Zhuang language,covering the definition of common words in Zhuang language and the quantitative characteristics of two groups of common words,i.e.the group with the rank of top 1000 words and the one with the rank of the words before “h-point”.The results demonstrate that the high-frequency common words of Zhuang,Mandarin Chinese and English share certain similarities: the high-frequency common words ranking before the “h-point” of the three languages are short in word length,among which the monosyllabic words account for the largest proportion,which means that they follow the “Principle of Least Efforts” in that the words with higher frequency tend to be shorter;among these common words,nouns account for the highest proportion;in the common words ranking the top 1000,the proportion of notional words in Zhuang language is significantly different from that of Chinese and English,(esp.English),which is as high as 85.63% and 91.5% respectively.Conjunctions and auxiliary words occupy an extremely low proportion,which indicates that Zhuang language does not rely on auxiliary words but by means of word order combination in forming sentences and conveying meanings.This study explores the possible universal and distinctive lexical features of Zhuang language and other languages from three aspects: word frequency distribution,word length distribution and quantitative characteristics of common words.Not only does it open up new perspectives for the study of lexical statistics of Zhuang language,which is conducive to people's general understanding of the lexical system of Zhuang,but also provides a new language category for the verification of the quantitative linguistic theory.