Evolution of Part-of-Speech in Classical Chinese
This provides insights into linguistic evolution for researchers in historical linguistics and computational linguistics, but it is incremental as it builds on existing claims with new data and methods.
The study tackled the problem of understanding part-of-speech evolution in Classical Chinese by applying entropy-based metrics to historical corpora, finding that verbs undergo more semantic change than nouns and that concreteness correlates with noun usage.
Classical Chinese is a language notable for its word class flexibility: the same word may often be used as a noun or a verb. Bisang (2008) claimed that Classical Chinese is a precategorical language, where the syntactic position of a word determines its part-of-speech category. In this paper, we apply entropy-based metrics to evaluate these claims on historical corpora. We further explore differences between nouns and verbs in Classical Chinese: using psycholinguistic norms, we find a positive correlation between concreteness and noun usage. Finally, we align character embeddings from Classical and Modern Chinese, and find that verbs undergo more semantic change than nouns.