Language change in Chinese political discourse based on the relationship between sentence and clause

Language change in Chinese political discourse based on the relationship between sentence and clause Renkui Hou Guangzhou Univer- sity, Guangzhou, China hourk0917 @163.com Chu-Ren Huang The Hong Kong Poly- technic University, Hong Kong churen.huang @polyu.edu.hk Kathleen Ahrens The Hong Kong Poly- technic University, Hong Kong Kathleen.ahrens @polyu.edu.cn Xiaoyi Du Central China Normal University, Huhan, China 565608551 @qq.com Abstract The present paper explored the language change in Chi- nese political discourse in Mainland through the investi- gation of the relationship between sentence and clause based on Menzerath-Altmann law. The results showed that the relationship between sentence and clause in first and second periods (1978-1982 and 1997-2001) Chinese political discourses abide by the Menzerath-Altmann law, while they do not abide by the law in third period. The average clause length distribution in first and second pe- riods political discourse can be fitted by the y=axb and the fitted parameters can distinguish the different periods political speeches. The relationship between sentence and clause changed with time. 1 Introduction Language diachronic change has been main concern of linguists from centuries in many parts of the world and is one of the topics of research for classical linguistic stud- ies. Different from classical linguistics, which mainly concern the diachronic changes of the consecutive lan- guage elements with time, this paper considered language as a complex system and explored the change of this sys- tem from time to time. Cacoullos (1999) showed that re- ductive changes in grammaticalizing forms may be not only as a diachronic process but also as synchronic dif- ferences between formal and informal registers. On the contrary, it is possible that the synchronic differences were considered as the diachronic changes of language. This paper focused on one same register, political dis- course, for examining the Chinese language change in order to avoid this mistake. Biber (2012) also argued strongly that reference works that describe different lin- guistics levels should consider register difference. Thus, we should consider register as an influencing factor for studying language change. Quantitative linguistics consider language as a com- plex adaptive system and adapts to the surrounding envi- ronment all the time as like Wang (2006). The Menzerath-Altmann law, as the one of three laws of quantitative linguistics, examines the relationship be- tween language constructs and their immediate constitu- ents in different language domains. Based on Menzerath (1954), which proposed “the greater the whole, the smaller its parts” after he examined that dependency of syllable length on word length, Altmann generalized this hypothesis to all the language levels, formulating it as “The longer a language construct, the shorter its compo- nents” (Altmann 1980). Altmann (1980) gave the theoretical derivation and the corresponding differential equation of the MA law, as shown in Equation (1). 𝑥���′ 𝑥��� = −𝑐 + 𝑏 𝑥 Equation (1) The solution to this differential equation is shown in the Formula (1): 𝑥��� = 𝑎𝑥𝑏𝑒−𝑏���𝑥 Formula (1) where y is the mean size of the immediate constituents, x is the size of the construct, and parameters a, …

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