A corpus-based study of N1-N2 words in archaic Chinese

Abstract

In Modern Chinese, the majority of words with a combination of two characters have been identified as compounds. However, the general consensus is that compounds or disyllabic words did not exist in early Archaic Chinese (before 220 BC). While some previous research has reported the occurrence of disyllabic words or compounds, the only compounds identified in Archaic Chinese were proper nouns and reduplicative words. The aim of this study is to investigate more thoroughly the origin of disyllabic words in the history of Mandarin. It focuses, in particular, on the nominal combination of two nouns (N1-N2), the most frequently occurring and highly productive combination in later periods. The research adopts a corpus-based approach to analyse a sample of texts spanning a period of over 3000 years. The findings show that nominal words with N1-N2 sequences originated in early Archaic Chinese, and these N1-N2 words were structurally formed using a range of linguistic rules. The occurrence of words in a set of nominal N1-N2 words (identified in the early Archaic period) decreased during later periods, probably a result of the uneven distribution of genres in the corpus, and changes in language use due to transformations of cultural and political systems. The main conclusions drawn from this research are that compounding was not only the consequence of the phonological simplification of the Medieval period, and that other types of compounds, in addition to proper nouns and reduplicates, occurred in Archaic Chinese. Further research is recommended to assess the constituents of compounds phonologically, morphologically, and semantically to better understand the order of sequences of the constituents of compounds and the historical disappearance of some compounds.

Date of Award	2019
Original language	English