Synergetic Properties of Chinese Verb Valency

ABSTRACT

This paper analyses the 500 most frequent verbs in contemporary Chinese and investigates their synergetic properties. The results show that the rank-frequency distributions of both valency and polysemy abide by a power-law distribution and that valency and polysemy of these verbs abide by the Good distribution and the positive negative binomial distribution respectively. Statistical analysis indicates that the greater valency a verb has, the greater polysemy, frequency and polytextuality can be expected. To find a suitable unit of measurement, strokes, a feature of the Chinese writing system, and pinyin, a phonemic transcription system of Chinese, are introduced in the present study to measure word length. These two types of word length correlate highly with each other, and both exhibit some inverse interrelations with other linguistic variables like verb valency, polysemy, frequency and polytextuality. Finally, based on these findings, we present a synergetic model (control cycle) of Chinese verb valency.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This work is supported by the National Social Science Foundation of China (11&ZD188 and 13CYY040).

Notes

¹ Language Situation in China: 2011 contains a list of high frequency Chinese words used in the year 2010 together with their word frequencies and number of texts in which they appear. Compiled by the Department of Language Information Management, Ministry of Education, and published by China’s State Language Commission and the Commercial Press, the annual report of Language Situation in China covers language policies and planning initiatives, new trends in language use, and major events concerning languages in China. The 2011 report covers a corpus of 1,158,219 texts from newspapers, radio and TV programmes and news websites in the year 2010. These texts contain 601,649,583 word tokens and 2,175,837 word types, including some common alphabetical words. A frequency of a verb refers to its occurrences in the total word tokens.

² The Contemporary Chinese Dictionary is an authoritative one-volume dictionary aiming at standardizing Chinese and the first of its kind. The English explanations listed in the paper are from its Chinese-English edition published by the Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press.

³ For details about this treebank, please refer to the above literature.