English

Evolution of Part-of-Speech in Classical Chinese

Computation and Language 2020-09-24 v1

Abstract

Classical Chinese is a language notable for its word class flexibility: the same word may often be used as a noun or a verb. Bisang (2008) claimed that Classical Chinese is a precategorical language, where the syntactic position of a word determines its part-of-speech category. In this paper, we apply entropy-based metrics to evaluate these claims on historical corpora. We further explore differences between nouns and verbs in Classical Chinese: using psycholinguistic norms, we find a positive correlation between concreteness and noun usage. Finally, we align character embeddings from Classical and Modern Chinese, and find that verbs undergo more semantic change than nouns.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2009.11144,
  title  = {Evolution of Part-of-Speech in Classical Chinese},
  author = {Bai Li},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2009.11144},
  year   = {2020}
}