Evolution of Part-of-Speech in Classical Chinese

TL;DR

This paper investigates the evolution of part-of-speech in Classical Chinese using entropy metrics, psycholinguistic norms, and embedding alignment, revealing insights into word class flexibility, semantic change, and the relationship between concreteness and noun usage.

Contribution

It applies entropy-based analysis and embedding alignment to study POS evolution in Classical Chinese, providing new quantitative evidence for language change and word class behavior.

Findings

Classical Chinese exhibits flexible word classes with positional influences.

A positive correlation exists between concreteness and noun usage in Classical Chinese.

Verbs show more semantic change over time compared to nouns.

Abstract

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.