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".
Highlights
Word evolution, which basically consists of word formation, word usage and word death, is an essential step for the evolution of human languages [1,2,3,4,5]
By exploring the evolution of word length in Chinese written texts, we show that the increase of word length is an essential regularity of word evolution in written Chinese
There are two kinds of word length distributions, one is static, which is based on word types, and the other is dynamic, which is based on word tokens
Summary
Word evolution, which basically consists of word formation, word usage and word death, is an essential step for the evolution of human languages [1,2,3,4,5]. It is suggested that word frequency is closely connected to word evolution [6,7,8]. One case in point is that frequent words tend to be short. This law has been proposed and popularized by Zipf [9,10], suggesting that word frequency is a strong indicator of word evolution. There have been an array of studies about word length, for example, Best et al [11] examined numerous problems concerning word length distributions in many languages including Chinese. By exploring the evolution of word length in Chinese written texts, we show that the increase of word length is an essential regularity of word evolution in written Chinese
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