Abstract:
Based on a diachronic corpus with 230 million Chinese characters and combined with the statistical method and word embedding algorithm, this paper makes a quantitative study of 13 verbal classifiers in pre-modern Chinese language. From a macro perspective, this study shows and explains the general situation and characteristics of verbal classifiers in pre-modern Chinese, and tries to serve for the study of Chinese history and the teaching of quantifiers. Firstly, combined with statistical and regular methods, it finishes pre-processing work of the automatic recognition of verbal classifiers, word segmentation, and verbal classifiers collocation in pre-modern Chinese language. Secondly, it measures the frequency of various verbal classifiers, verbal classifiers’ syntactic forms, and finds the differences in the word frequency of verbal classifiers in classical Chinese and vernacular Chinese. Finally, according to the lexical semantic system of
Synonym Forest, it analyzes the advantage and disadvantage of semantic categories of verbs modified by verbal classifiers, and finds that there is a non-compulsory and probabilistic relationship between the semantic categories of verbs and whether the verbs are modified by passive quantifiers.