How Does Word Length Evolve in Written Chinese?

Heng Chen; Junying Liang; Haitao Liu

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0138567

How Does Word Length Evolve in Written Chinese?

PLoS One. 2015 Sep 18;10(9):e0138567. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0138567. eCollection 2015.

Authors

Heng Chen¹, Junying Liang², Haitao Liu³

Affiliations

¹ Center for the Study of Language and Cognition, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, CN-310028, China.
² Department of Linguistics, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, CN-310058, China.
³ Department of Linguistics, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, CN-310058, China; Ningbo Institute of Technology, Zhejiang University, Ningbo, CN-315100, China.

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".

Publication types

Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

Asian People
Biological Evolution
Humans
Language*
Reading
Speech Perception*
Writing*

Grants and funding

This work is supported by the National Social Science Foundation of China (Grant number: 11 & ZD 188). URL: http://www.npopss-cn.gov.cn/. Haitao Liu received the funding. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.