1. How Many Chinese Words Have Elastic Length?
San Duanmu · City University of Hong Kong Press eBooks · 2013
A word has elastic length when it has both a short form and a long form, such as煤-煤炭 ‘coal’ and 种-种植 ‘to plant’. The goal of this study is to find out how many Chinese words have this property. We sample 1/50 of all monomorphemic Chinese words, selected from those represented by the top 3,000 most common characters. It is found that 80%-90% of all Chinese words have elastic length. In addition, the percentage for verbs is higher than the average, and the percentage for nouns is higher still.