Evolution of Part-of-Speech in Classical Chinese

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2009.11144v1
• Date: Wed, 23 Sep 2020 13:41:27 GMT
• Title: Evolution of Part-of-Speech in Classical Chinese
• Authors: Bai Li
• Abstract summary: Bisang (2008) claimed that Classical Chinese is a precategorical language, where the syntactic position of a word determines its part-of-speech category. We apply entropy-based metrics to evaluate these claims on historical corpora.
• Score: 2.870517198186329
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• 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.

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