title: How Does Word Length Evolve in Written Chinese?
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".
authors.affiliation: Center for the Study of Language and Cognition, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, CN-310028, China.
authors.forename: Heng
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Chen
authors.affiliation: Department of Linguistics, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, CN-310058, China.
authors.forename: Junying
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Liang
authors.affiliation: Department of Linguistics, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, CN-310058, China; Ningbo Institute of Technology, Zhejiang University, Ningbo, CN-315100, China.
authors.forename: Haitao
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Liu
mesh_terms: D044466:Asian People; D005075:Biological Evolution; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D011932:Reading; D013067:Speech Perception; D014956:Writing