Readers 读者
Polysyllabicity in the modern Chinese verb: An attempt to quantify a linguistic drift
现代汉语动词的多音节性：计量语言渐变的尝试
Kai-fat Lee
Abstract 摘要
Many Linguists have long noticed a general tendency in Modern Chinese to form disyllabic and polysyllabic words. The issue has appeared to most people a dead horse that does not deserve any more flogging. In the present paper, a 16,000-character corpus of Modern Chinese verbs is prepared by random sampling from a population of thirteen novels written between 1903 and 1934 to study this particular trend. Apart from the mundane statistics of relative frequencies, a method of quantifying linguistic drift is proposed.
Journal of Chinese Linguistics volume 4 (ISSN 0091-3723)
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