Chinese legal texts – Quantitative Description

Abstract

The aim of the paper is to provide a quantitative description of legal Chinese. This study adopts the approach of corpus-based analyses and it shows basic statistical parameters of legal texts in Chinese, namely the length of a sentence, the proportion of part of speech etc. The research is conducted on the Chinese monolingual corpus Hanku . The paper also discusses the issues of statistical data processing from various corpora, e.g. the tokenisation and part of speech tagging and their relevance to study of registers variation.