Synergetic Properties of Chinese Verb Valency

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis paper analyses the 500 most frequent verbs in contemporary Chinese and investigates their synergetic properties. The results show that the rank-frequency distributions of both valency and polysemy abide by a power-law distribution and that valency and polysemy of these verbs abide by the Good distribution and the positive negative binomial distribution respectively. Statistical analysis indicates that the greater valency a verb has, the greater polysemy, frequency and polytextuality can be expected. To find a suitable unit of measurement, strokes, a feature of the Chinese writing system, and pinyin, a phonemic transcription system of Chinese, are introduced in the present study to measure word length. These two types of word length correlate highly with each other, and both exhibit some inverse interrelations with other linguistic variables like verb valency, polysemy, frequency and polytextuality. Finally, based on these findings, we present a synergetic model (control cycle) of Chinese verb valency.