Abstract
This research examines the vocabulary used in Chinese newspapers using a diachronic corpus spanning 77 years, from 1872 to 1949. The Zipfian distribution in word use can be observed in the corpus, and the top frequency of words varies dramatically throughout epochs. The frequency of word types and tokens exhibits an inverted V-shaped trend. In terms of word entropy, a similar tendency has been discovered. Words that existed only once in history do well in representing linguistic life in the period. At the same time, the proportion of new words in the entire corpus is decreasing, reflecting the steady stabilizing of word growth.
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Acknowledgments
This paper is supported by MOE Funds of Humanity and Social Sciences “Quantitative Research on Words Usage in Newspaper since late Qing Dynasty” (20YJC740050).
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Li, Z., Gao, T., Huang, G., Rao, G. (2023). Study of Chinese Words in Diachronic Corpus of Newspaper. In: Su, Q., Xu, G., Yang, X. (eds) Chinese Lexical Semantics. CLSW 2022. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 13495. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-28953-8_29
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