Synergetic Studies On Some Properties Of Lexical Structures In Chinese And English

This study investigates the interrelations between word length,word frequency,polysemy,and synonymy in Chinese and English under the synergetic lexical model.The original synergetic lexical model assumed a unilateral influence between each pair of variables.However,recent researches suggest that the influence between variables is mutual,because language is a dynamic self-regulating system,in which the change of one lexical property will inevitably be restricted by other properties until a new balanced state is reached.Therefore,this study is to investigate the interrelations between these four variables under the synergetic lexical model,including the original relations and other relations that have been excluded in this model.As one of the most important variables in synergetic lexical model,synonymy has seldom been studied due to the rareness of synonymy thesaurus.By including synonymy in investigation in this study,a more comprehensive synergetic lexical model is adopted.Data of these languages are obtained from dictionaries and corpora.Of the Chinese data,the Chinese Modern Dictionary(5^thEdition)is used to obtain polysemy data,the HIT IR-Lab Tongyici Cilin（Extended）is used for synonymy data,and Lancaster Corpus of Mandarin Chinese（LCMC）is the source of word frequency.Of the English data,Merriam-Webster’s 11^thCollegiate Dictionary is used to obtain polysemy data,Roget’s 21 Century Thesaurus（3rd Edition）is used for synonymy data,and Corpus of Contemporary American English（COCA）is the source of word frequency.From these resources we select 800 words of Chinese and English respectively.The length of these words is measured by syllables.Data collected from these resources are then to be tested on power functions modeling the relationship between these variables.These relations consist of:1)unilateral relations assumed by the original synergetic lexical model;2)inverse relations assumed in this study;3)interrelations that are excluded in original synergetic lexical model–the relations between polysemy and word frequency,as well as those between synonymy and word frequency.The fitting results of Chinese and English data are highly consistent.In both languages,it can be observed that:1)the longer the word length,the lower the frequency of the word,but not vice versa;2)there exist strong mutual dependence between polysemy and word length;3)there exists moderate influence of synonymy over polysemy and word length;4)there are no direct interrelations between synonymy and word frequency.The only difference between data from Chinese and English concerns the interrelations between polysemy and word frequency:in Chinese,there exists direct influence of polysemy on word frequency;however,the dependence between these two variables is observed to be indirect and mutual according to the data from English.This difference may result from different sizes of texts from which the data of word frequency are obtained,or from the typological differences of these two languages–Chinese is a Sino-Tibetan language while English is Indo-European language,on which the original synergetic lexical model is set up.In summary,this study confirms the cross-linguistic validity of synergetic lexical model on data from Chinese and English.Except for this,our investigation of the interrelations between each pair of the four variables–word length,word frequency,polysemy,and synonymy–may contribute to the improvement of the synergetic lexical model.