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Workshop on Chinese Lexical Semantics

CLSW 2016: Chinese Lexical Semantics pp 101–109Cite as

Quantitative Relation of the Length and the Count of Senses for Chinese Polysyllabic Words

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 10085))

Abstract

Polysyllabic (i.e. having two or more syllables) words account for a major part in the modern Chinese vocabulary. In Chinese, polysyllabic words are more than a collection of syllables; they are a combination of meaningful morphemes and thus a profound manifestation of the phonetic, semantic and syntactic laws in Chinese language. This study focuses on the polysyllabic words in the Comprehensive Dictionary of Chinese Words and examines the quantitative relation between their number of senses and word length. The data indicate that when the word length increases, the number of senses decreases, and monosemous words are in majority. The negative correlation between number of senses and word length of Chinese polysyllabic words is due to the restriction of word meaning caused by involved morphemic meanings. This reveals a significant difference between Chinese and typical Western languages from a quantitative perspective.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Computer and Communication Engineering, University of Science and Technology Beijing (USTB), Beijing, China

    Wei Huangfu

  2. College of Humanities and Social Sciences, Beijing Language and Culture University, Beijing, China

    Bing Qiu

  3. Faculty of Humanities, Department of Chinese Language Studies, The Education University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China

    Wei Huangfu & Bing Qiu

Authors
  1. Wei Huangfu
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  2. Bing Qiu
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Wei Huangfu .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Institute for Infocomm Research , Singapore, Singapore

    Minghui Dong

  2. Nanyang Technological University , Singapore, Singapore

    Jingxia Lin

  3. Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, China

    Xuri Tang

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Huangfu, W., Qiu, B. (2016). Quantitative Relation of the Length and the Count of Senses for Chinese Polysyllabic Words. In: Dong, M., Lin, J., Tang, X. (eds) Chinese Lexical Semantics. CLSW 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10085. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-49508-8_10

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-49508-8_10

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-49507-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-49508-8

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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