A Quantitative and Qualitative Comparison of Word Formation in Modern Standard Chinese & Early Modern Chinese

This project proposes a rigorous and innovative comparison of Modern Standard Chinese language (MSC) and Early Modern Chinese language (EMC) particularly with respect to word formation and lexical development, drawing on qualitative analysis followed by linguists and quantitative measures established in information sciences. While MSC evolves from EMC and Classical Chinese, and all share a largely common set of several thousand Chinese characters, it is usual for someone educated in MSC to have only limited comprehension of EMC and Classical Chinese. The researchers thus ask why such a largely common base could make a vast linguistic difference over time, and how lexical, syntactic, and semantic evolution has changed the way Chinese characters carry information content. To this end, besides describing such changes qualitatively, it would also be useful to characterize the changes by some objective quantitative indices, which would allow comparison of our language at one point of time or across several in history. The researchers thus aim at comparing EMC and MSC primarily from the lexical perspective, with respect to issues and differences in word formation and related grammatical changes in the linguistic properties of lexical items.It is well-known that MSC has many more polysyllabic words than monosyllabic ones when compared with EMC or Classical Chinese. Qualitatively, the researchers will compare MSC and EMC with respect to many fundamental issues relating to internal changes in the linguistic properties of especially disyllabic lexical items, such as categorial fluidity (e.g. nouns becoming verbs and vice versa) and selectional restriction (e.g. changes in the types of nouns which verbs can take as object), in addition to morphological relationships underlying word formation. The fundamental issues are critical to the study of Chinese because it is basically inflection-free when compared with the familiar European languages and so would benefit from non-Euro-centric methodology of investigation. Quantitatively, the researchers will make use of the entropy concept to compare the information content of MSC and EMC at both the character and word levels and in terms of monosyllabic and disyllabic words. Such qualitative analysis and quantitative measure would not be possible without large language databases; hence this project will involve large EMC and MSC databases. The qualitative and quantitative analysis will not only further our understanding of the relation between information content and word structure in EMC and MSC, but will also provide valuable and substantive resources for educational purposes.