An Exploration for Diachronic Patterns in Chinese Character Networks
Zhongli Jiang · Fuza xitong yu fuzaxing kexue · 2012
This study used two texts from different historical periods,both of which concerned on the topic of Three Kingdoms Period.The Three Kingdoms had a classical style of writing and the Romance of the Three Kingdoms was a mixture of both classical and vernacular Chinese.By defining immediate adjacent relations directed from former characters to later ones inside sentences as directed lines,two character adjacent co-occurrence networks were established for the two texts respectively.It was revealed that there are similar statistical properties embedded in these two networks of different periods: the highly connected characters have high frequencies;both of the networks have global patterns of small world,scale-free and disassortative mixing structures.Triad censuses of these two networks had suggested that two types of triad(16~300 and 15~210) have prominent distributions and the hierarchical clusters model can partly explain the properties of their triad censuses.This paper also reported the differences between the statistical indices of the two networks and discussed their significance.