Scale-Invariance Exists in the Series of Character Intervals in the Four Great Chinese Novels**Supported by the Innovation and Entrepreneurship Program of Shanghai University of Science and Technology under Grant No. XJ10252127, National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant Nos. 11875042 and 11505114

Abstract

The scale-invariance behavior has been widely observed in English or other phonetic language texts. In the present study, we examine whether the semantic language, Chinese can also show this behavior. Typically, the scale-invariance behavior is examined in the series of character intervals for the four great Chinese novels by a method of detrended fluctuation analysis. We observe that the scale-invariance behavior characterized by a scaling exponent around 0.60 exists in each novel. Moreover, we divide each novel into three parts with equal number of chapters, and we also observe the existence of scale-invariance in the interval series for each part. Interestingly, we find that there is evident difference in the scaling exponents between the first (or second) part and the third part in the novel of A dream of red mansions, and the difference between parts is not evident for the other three novels. Our observation suggests that there are two writing styles in A dream of red mansions, which are consistent with current prevailing view that the first 80 chapters and the last 40 chapters were accomplished by Xueqin Cao and E Gao, respectively. Our method may shed light on the identification of writing styles in written texts.