Reconstruction of Uncertain Historical Evolution of the Polysyllablization of Chinese Lexis

Polysyllablization, closely related to phonetics, semantics, and syntactics, is one of the fundamental trends in the development of Chinese lexis. However, with lots of uncertainties in the historical evolution of Chinese language, the quantitative modeling and reconstruction of polysyllablization r...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Bing Qiu, Jie Li
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Wiley 2014-01-01
Series:Journal of Applied Mathematics
Online Access:http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2014/123983
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Polysyllablization, closely related to phonetics, semantics, and syntactics, is one of the fundamental trends in the development of Chinese lexis. However, with lots of uncertainties in the historical evolution of Chinese language, the quantitative modeling and reconstruction of polysyllablization remain open questions. Based on the Comprehensive Dictionary of Chinese Words, a mapping from the words to their time of occurrence is built. With the inverse mapping on random samples, the newly produced words with different numbers of syllables in different time periods are obtained. Finally the total quadratic variation minimization model is adopted to estimate the trend of polysyllablization. As a novel exploration in the computational linguistics, the results agree with the stage division of historical Chinese and answer some difficult questions related to polysyllablization in a quantitative manner.
ISSN:1110-757X
1687-0042