Synergetic Properties of Lexical Structures in Chinese and English

ABSTRACT The synergetic lexical model provides a unique framework for exploration of the interrelationships between the lexical properties of languages. Previous studies concerning several properties of this lexical model have yielded many successful fittings results, but very few studies have investigated synonymy, a major property of this model. The present study uses 825 Chinese and 848 English tokens retrieved from Chinese and English corpora, dictionaries, and thesaurus to conduct a contrastive study on the interrelations between four major properties of this lexical model: word length, word frequency, polysemy, and synonymy. The successful fittings of both languages demonstrate the cross-linguistic validity of the synergetic lexical model, though English belongs to the Germanic language family, while Chinese, a highly analytical language, is of the Sino-Tibetan language family. Moreover, our analysis of the parameters of the fitting results shows that, compared to English, Chinese possesses a greater resistance to shortening word length and a quicker response to semantic change.