A Study of Monosyllabic Words' Turning into Disyllabic and Polysyllabic Ones in Ancient Chinese Based on the Data of Disyllabic and Polysyllabic Words
Shichun Li · Journal of Southwest Jiaotong University · 2007
Many scholars studied disyllabic and polysyllabic words in the ancient Chinese books by qualitative-quantitative method and acquired a large number of dependable data and reliable conclusions.Based on these data and with quantity,frequency,semantic entry and word-formation as the standards of judging monosyllabic words' turning into disyllabic and polysyllabic ones in the development of ancient Chinese,we can find that the number of disyllabic and polysyllabic words in ancient Chinese increased quickly and nearly every word-formation emerged in the later period of ancient Chinese.Thus it is concluded that monosyllabic words' turning into disyllabic and polysyllabic ones had its first rapid increase in ancient Chinese.However,compared with the monosyllabic words,disyllabic and polysyllabic words had a lower frequency of usage and a narrower range of semantic entries.Accordingly,it is concluded that monosyllabic words turned into disyllabic and polysyllabic ones in an unbalanced way.