Language change in Report on the Work of the Government by Premiers of the People’s Republic of China

Language change in Report on the Work of the Government by Premiers of the People’s Republic of China Renkui Hou Guangzhou University, Guangzhou, China hourk0917 @163.com Chu-Ren Huang The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong churen.huang @polyu.edu.hk Kathleen Ahrens The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong Kathleen.ahrens @polyu.edu.cn Abstract The present paper explored the focusing topics change and language change in Report on the Work of the Gov- ernment by Premiers of the People’s Republic of China (hereinafter Report texts). The text clustering and corre- spondence analysis showed the focusing topics change in selected three periods Report texts. The Report texts were represented by the clause length distribution and clus- tered. The clustering result showed the differences of clause length usages in the Report texts. The relationship between clause length and word length was studied. The average word length decreases with clause length and were fitted using the function, 𝑥��� = 𝑎𝑥𝑏 based on the Menzerath-Altmann Law. The relationship between the three periods Report texts represented by the fitted pa- rameters, a and b, were explored. 1 Introduction Language change has been main concern of linguists from centuries in many parts of the world and is the topic of research for classical linguistic studies. However, these early works tended to focus on sound and sound changes, tracing back to work by Pāṇini in 4th century BCE. Biber (2012) argued strongly that reference works that describe different linguistics levels, i.e., lexical, grammatical, and lexico-grammatical, should consider register difference. Language is the mode of political discourse. For exam- ple, the president candidates will demonstrate their ideas and policies in the debates. Van Dijk (1997) defined the political discourse based on three dimensions: the actors, the political scope of the discourse and the context of communication. From the above definition, a discourse is considered as ‘political’ when it is produced by a po- litical actor carrying out a political action (e.g. to govern, legislate, protest or vote) in an institutional context of communication. Randour et al. (2020) conducted a sys- tematic literature review of 164 scientific articles from the Scopus database and confirmed that political dis- course is generally limited to the discourses of (institu- tionalized) political elites and most specifically to oral monological speeches. The Menzerath-Altmann law originates from the fact that the length of a construct influences the lengths of its immediate constituents in different language domains. It is summarized as “the greater the whole, the smaller its parts” by Paul Menzerath after he detected the depend- ency of syllable length on word length (Menzerath 1954). Altmann generalized this hypothesis to all the language levels, formulating it as “The longer a language construct, the shorter its components” (Altmann 1980). Hřebíček (1992, 1995, 1997) showed that the whole hierarchy of textual levels is based on this dependency, and called this the Menzerath-Altmann law. 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) …

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