Quantitative Analysis on verb valence evolution of Chinese

Abstract

The paper aims at studying the evolution of syntactic valency of Chinese verbs. We construct three corpora of ancient classical Chinese, ancient vernacular Chinese and modern vernacular Chinese. From these corpora, ten main verbs are selected to probe into the evolution of their valency, namely, their complements and adjuncts. The paper reveals that the syntactic structures has a trend toward complex. The ancient classical Chinese and the ancient vernacular Chinese are similar in sentence structure. With the transformation from the ancient vernacular to the modern vernacular, syntactic complexity increases dramatically, indicating drastic changes in sentence structure.