A Study on the Diachronic Evolution of Ancient Chinese Vocabulary Based on a Large-Scale Rough Annotated Corpus
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- Asia Pacific Journal of Corpus Research
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- v.2 no.2
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- pp.31-41
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- 2021
This paper makes a quantitative analysis of the diachronic evolution of ancient Chinese vocabulary by constructing and counting a large-scale rough annotated corpus. The texts from Si Ku Quan Shu (a collection of Chinese ancient books) are automatically segmented to obtain ancient Chinese vocabulary with time information, which is used to the statistics on word frequency, standardized type/token ratio and proportion of monosyllabic words and dissyllabic words. Through data analysis, this study has the following four findings. Firstly, the high-frequency words in ancient Chinese are stable to a certain extent. Secondly, there is no obvious dissyllabic trend in ancient Chinese vocabulary. Moreover, the Northern and Southern Dynasties (420-589 AD) and Yuan Dynasty (1271-1368 AD) are probably the two periods with the most abundant vocabulary in ancient Chinese. Finally, the unique words with high frequency in each dynasty are mainly official titles with real power. These findings break away from qualitative methods used in traditional researches on Chinese language history and instead uses quantitative methods to draw macroscopic conclusions from large-scale corpus.
This study is based on the Korean-Chinese parallel corpus, utilizing the Korean connective morpheme '-myenseo' and contrasting with the Chinese expression. Korean learners often struggle with the use of Korean Connective Morpheme especially when there is a lexical gap between their mother language. '-myenseo' is of the most use Korean Connective Morpheme, it usually contrast to the Chinese coordinating conjunction. But according to the corpus, the contrastive Chinese expression to '-myenseo' is more than coordinating conjunction. So through this study, can help the Chinese Korean language learners learn easier while studying '-myenseo', because the variety Chinese expression are found from the parallel corpus that related to '-myenseo'. In this study, firstly discussed the semantic features and syntactic characteristics of '-myenseo'. The significant semantic features of '-myenseo' are 'simultaneous' and 'conflict'. So in this chapter the study use examples of usage to analyse the specific usage of '-myenseo'. And then this study analyse syntactic characteristics of '-myenseo' through the subject constraint, predicate constraints, temporal constraints, mood constraints, negatives constraints. then summarize them into a table. And the most important part of this study is Chapter 4. In this chapter, it contrasted the Korean connective morpheme '-myenseo' to the Chinese expression by analysing the Korean-Chinese parallel corpus. As a result of the analysis, the frequency of the Chinese expression that contrasted to '-myenseo' is summarized into