How will text size influence the length of its linguistic constituents?
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Huiyuan Jin
Abstract
As human language is a multi-level complex adaptive system, a text can be seen as emergent from the complex interactions between internal and external factors. Text types such as microblog have size restriction, an external variable which may affect relevant quantitative properties of the texts themselves. Such texts provide a good opportunity to investigate the interactions between the external and internal factors of human language from the perspective of complex adaptive system. This study focuses on how the size restriction of Chinese microblog texts affects the length of their sentences and clauses. Quantitative properties concerning sentence and clause length of Chinese microblog texts are analyzed and compared with those of texts with no size restriction (i.e., prose, news report and romantic fiction). Analysis of sentence length distribution shows that size restriction has an impact on sentence length measured by numbers of words and clauses. The correlation between sentence length and clause length is examined with Menzerath-Altmann law. The satisfying fitting result of microblog texts probably suggests that, language units are able to re-organize and re-regulate their structures according to relevant external factors, until they reach a balanced new system.
5 Acknowledgements
This study was partly supported by the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (Program of Big Data PLUS Language Universals and Cognition, Zhejiang University) and the MOE Project of the Center for Linguistics and Applied Linguistics, Guangdong University of Foreign Studies.
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Appendix I
We will introduce the detailed selecting process concerning the four corpora in our study here. First, Sina Microblog is the most influential and the most popular microblog operator in China’s mainland. Microblog texts from Sina microblog roll of the hour, which represent texts from the most influential micro bloggers, were selected into our research. Sina microblog roll of the hour includes microblog texts from the most influential micro bloggers, such as famous celebrities, media, governments, schools, and websites. These microblog texts, be they personal or official, are frequently transmitted and highly influential, which could accurately represent the language features of Chinese microblog. Table 5 listed the source of these Chinese microblog texts.
Sample source of Chinese microblog texts.
| Source | No. | Time | Category | Examples |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Most favorite general | 2740 | 8, 2015 | most favorite microblog | Oriental metropolis; Focus of thought |
| Most favorite media | 927 | 8, 2015 | media microblog | CCTV; music |
| Most favorite celebrity | 825 | 8, 2015 | celebrity microblog | Li Kaifu; He jiong |
| Most favorite websites | 812 | 8, 2015 | websites microblog | Fengxing websites; Mogu Street |
| Most favorite schools | 815 | 8, 2015 | schools microblog | Peking Unversity; Zhejiang university |
| Most favorite governments | 881 | 8, 2015 | governments microblog | Chinese government; China national radio |
| Total | 7000 | 8, 2015 | ||
Second, formal written language may include various text types, among which news texts may have typical characteristics of formal language. In the English corpus of Freiburg-Brown (abbreviated as Frown), there are three text types concerning the domain of news, i.e. press reportage, press editorial, and press reviews. Thus the corpus of news report was chosen from News Co-broadcasting. It is an official news program that being reported in Chinese Central Television 1. It is the most influential and comprehensive news reports, which covers the sub-types of the press reportage, press editorial, and press reviews. Thus news texts of News Co-broadcasting from 2 August 2015 to 18 August 2015 were chosen as the formal written samples in our study.
Third, the corpus of Chinese prose with the diverse stylistic features was built for comparison with microblog texts. Generally speaking, proses may also be divided into three sub-genres, i.e. argumentative prose, narrative prose, and lyric prose, among which the last two sub-genres are more popular than the argumentative type. Since texts of microblogs are restricted with 140 Chinese characters, thus short proses instead of long ones were selected for our research. We then selected altogether 51 pieces of short proses created by different 10 famous Chinese modern prose writers, as listed in Table 6.
Sample source of short Chinese modern prose texts.
| Writers of prose texts | Number of argumentative prose texts | Number of narrative prose texts | Number of lyric prose texts | Number of word tokens |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ai Qing | 0 | 1 | 3 | 5,320 |
| Ba Jin | 1 | 1 | 2 | 7,934 |
| Bing Xin | 0 | 1 | 3 | 10,213 |
| Feng Zikai | 0 | 3 | 2 | 9,982 |
| Lu Xun | 4 | 1 | 1 | 11,021 |
| Guo Moruo | 2 | 1 | 1 | 8,829 |
| Ji Xianlin | 2 | 2 | 2 | 11,347 |
| Qian Zhongshu | 2 | 2 | 1 | 9,846 |
| Shi Tiesheng | 2 | 3 | 2 | 14,982 |
| Yu Qiuyu | 2 | 2 | 2 | 11,090 |
| Total | 15 | 17 | 19 | 100,564 |
Last, the corpus of Chinese fiction with the colloquial stylistic features was built for comparison with microblog texts. In Frown, there are 6 sub-types in the domain of fiction, i.e. general fiction, mystery and detective fiction, science fiction, adventure fiction, romantic fiction, and humor. One distinguishing feature of fictions from other formal written types of language is that conversations play an important role in portraying the characteristics of figures. Among these sub-genres of fiction, romantic fiction is a popular type in the modern history of Chinese literature. More importantly, romantic fictions may have large amount of psychological and colloquial descriptions when portraying characters. Thus we selected the subgenre of romantic fictions from Chinese modern famous short fictions as our target corpus. More detailed sample source fiction is listed in the following Table 7.
Sample source of short Chinese modern romantic fiction texts.
| Writers of fiction | Romantic fiction texts | Number of word tokens |
|---|---|---|
| Zhou Guoping | 2 | 17839 |
| Shen Congwen | 1 | 8231 |
| Zhang Jie | 1 | 7638 |
| Shi Tiesheng | 1 | 5987 |
| Chi Zijian | 1 | 8943 |
| Zhang Ailing | 3 | 23899 |
| Yu Hua | 1 | 5419 |
| Xiao Hong | 1 | 7932 |
| Wang Zengqi | 1 | 8361 |
| Wang Anyi | 1 | 5775 |
| Total | 10 | 100,024 |
© 2017 Faculty of English, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań, Poland
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Bilingual development of theta in a child
- How will text size influence the length of its linguistic constituents?
- The dimensions of learner attitudes to general british and general american: a survey-based study
- Derived Imperfective Tensing in Kurpian
- Analysing intersubjective resources in Persian and English newspaper opinion/editorials
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Bilingual development of theta in a child
- How will text size influence the length of its linguistic constituents?
- The dimensions of learner attitudes to general british and general american: a survey-based study
- Derived Imperfective Tensing in Kurpian
- Analysing intersubjective resources in Persian and English newspaper opinion/editorials
