Readers 读者
Chinese evolution in recent 150 years: A diachronic study of word frequency in The Gospel of Mark
近150年汉语的演化——基于《马可福音》词频的历时研究
Cong Zhang 张聪; Haitao Liu 刘海涛
Abstract 摘要
This study quantitatively investigated word frequencies in parallel Chinese texts 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 150 years. With the evolution of Chinese: both the types and tokens increased dia-chronically, and sharp changes can be found in the high-frequency func-tion words, vocabulary richness, and the distribution of word classes. The syntactic structure has also become increasingly complex. In addition, although the length of words (measured in character) has increased dia-chronically, disyllabic words have not always been preponderant in Chi-nese after the opium war of 1840–1842. The results show that the com-plication is a crucial trend in the evolution process of Chinese.
Subject Keywords 主题词
Language evolution 语言演化 Chinese 汉语 Word frequency 词频 The Gospel of Mark 马可福音 Quantitative methods 定量方法
Journal of Chinese Linguistics vol.47, no.2 (June 2019): 497-530
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