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Frequency in Chinese Ballad Song Lyrics: A Quantitative Morpheme-Based Study

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Chinese Lexical Semantics (CLSW 2022)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 13496))

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Abstract

The present study aims to study the non-material heritage – Chinese ballad song lyrics (Hua’er) – from the perspective of frequency distribution and the inner structure of the content words as well as the rhymed morphemes. The results yield, first of all, that the rank-frequency of both vocabularies and phonemes in Chinese prosody words can be well captured by the right-truncated modified Zipf-Alekseev distribution. Second, the autosemantics of Hua’er vividly depict the local customs and practices of Northwest China. Third, the two most frequently used Chinese compound finals are /an/ and /ɑŋ/. Apart from qualitative analysis, our quantitative study on the content words and phonemes also provides new insight into the field of heritage folk literature.

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Acknowledgements

This work was partially funded by the National Social Science Project of China entitled “The Construction of Chinese Folk Song Database and Quantitative Research from the Perspective of Chinese National Community” (Project code: 22BYY084), and Ningxia Philosophy and Social Sciences Planning Project entitled “A Comparative Perspective on the Digital Construction of Hua’er and Language Ecology in the Yellow River Cultural Inheritance Area” (Project code: 21NXBYY02).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Foreign Languages, North Minzu University, Ningxia, 750000, China

    Xiaojin Zhang

  2. College of Foreign Languages, Zhejiang University of Technology, Xihu District, Hangzhou, China

    Zheyuan Dai

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  1. Xiaojin Zhang
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  2. Zheyuan Dai
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Correspondence to Zheyuan Dai .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Peking University, Beijing, China

    Qi Su

  2. Minjiang University, Fuzhou, China

    Ge Xu

  3. Minjiang University, Fuzhou, China

    Xiaoyan Yang

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Zhang, X., Dai, Z. (2023). Frequency in Chinese Ballad Song Lyrics: A Quantitative Morpheme-Based Study. In: Su, Q., Xu, G., Yang, X. (eds) Chinese Lexical Semantics. CLSW 2022. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 13496. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-28956-9_7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-28956-9_7

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-031-28955-2

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-031-28956-9

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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