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How Does Word Length Evolve in Written Chinese?

Author

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  • Heng Chen
  • Junying Liang
  • Haitao Liu

Abstract

We demonstrate a substantial evidence that the word length can be an essential lexical structural feature for word evolution in written Chinese. The data used in this study are diachronic Chinese short narrative texts with a time span of over 2000-years. We show that the increase of word length is an essential regularity in word evolution. On the one hand, word frequency is found to depend on word length, and their relation is in line with the Power law function y = ax-b. On the other hand, our deeper analyses show that the increase of word length results in the simplification in characters for balance in written Chinese. Moreover, the correspondence between written and spoken Chinese is discussed. We conclude that the disyllabic trend may account for the increase of word length, and its impacts can be explained in "the principle of least effort".

Suggested Citation

  • Heng Chen & Junying Liang & Haitao Liu, 2015. "How Does Word Length Evolve in Written Chinese?," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 10(9), pages 1-12, September.
    • Handle: RePEc:plo:pone00:0138567
    DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0138567
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    1. Mark Pagel & Quentin D. Atkinson & Andrew Meade, 2007. "Frequency of word-use predicts rates of lexical evolution throughout Indo-European history," Nature, Nature, vol. 449(7163), pages 717-720, October.
    2. Erez Lieberman & Jean-Baptiste Michel & Joe Jackson & Tina Tang & Martin A. Nowak, 2007. "Quantifying the evolutionary dynamics of language," Nature, Nature, vol. 449(7163), pages 713-716, October.
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    Cited by:

    1. Heng Chen & Haitao Liu, 2018. "Quantifying Evolution of Short and Long-Range Correlations in Chinese Narrative Texts across 2000 Years," Complexity, Hindawi, vol. 2018, pages 1-12, February.

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