Abstract

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Title:: A Quantitative Analysis of Chinese Vocabulary Evolution Based onThe Great Chinese Dictionary

Keywords:: The Great Chinese Dictionary; vocabulary evolution; Chinese language history; glottochronology

Abstract:: The evolution of Chinese vocabulary is the key research field of the Chinese language history.For the lack of the tagged diachronic corpus, the overall quantitative analysis of the evolution of the Chinesevocabulary is hard to achieve. The Great Chinese Dictionary recording senses of both ancient and contemporarywords as historical resources was used. By manually labelling the periods of over 800,000 example sentencesconcerning over 300,000 entries in the dictionary, a diachronic Chinese lexical database was constructed.Then the number and word length of contemporary vocabulary in each historical period were presented andthe correlation between the number of words and their age was estimated by regression analysis. This studyprovides basic resources and facilitate the use of quantitative analysis in the study of Chinese language history.