Social changes through the lens of language: A big data study of Chinese modal verbs

Abstract

Leech’s corpus-based comparison of English modal verbs from 1961 to 1992 showed the steep decline of all modal verbs together, which he ascribed to continuing changes towards a more equal and less authority-driven society. This study inspired many diachronic and synchronic studies, mostly on English modal verbs and largely assuming the correlation between the use of modal verbs and power relations. Yet, there are continuing debates on sampling design and the choices of corpora. In addition, this hypothesis has not been attested in any other language with comparable corpus size or examined with longitudinal studies. This study tracks the use of Chinese modal verbs from 1901 to 2009, covering the historical events of the New Culture Movement, the establishment of the PRC, the implementation of simplified characters and the completion and finalization of simplification of the Chinese writing system. We found that the usage of modal verbs did rise and fall during the last century, and for more complex reasons. We also demonstrated that our longitudinal end-to-end approach produces convincing analysis on English modal verbs that reconciles conflicting results in the literature adopting Leech’s point-to-point approach.

Lexicon of Changes: Towards the Evaluation of Diachronic Semantic Shift in Chinese

“…In the near future, our goal is to scale up the dataset and to examine the performance of more models for Chinese, including the more recent contextualized embeddings (Devlin et al, 2019). Moreover, using finer-grained intervals for diachronic meaning change detection and exploring the diatopic variation between different Chinese dialects are also possible directions of our future work (Wang et al, 2022;Zampieri et al, 2019).…”

Regional varieties and diachronic changes in Chinese political discourse

“…For instance, the changes in the use of models marking different power relations between speakers and addressees have been shown to reflect the changes in the power dynamics of a society, e.g. Winter and Gärdenfors (1995), Leech (2012), Millar (2009), and Wang et al (2022). Linguistic encoding of weather, for example, has been shown to vary typologically.…”

“…Su et al (2021) showed that historical and geographic variations in professional gender segregation in China can be mapped to the use (or lack) of gender modification of professional terms. Wang et al (2022) showed that the use of different speech act constructions pragmatically reflects the different social dynamics in two culturally different societies: Guangzhou and Hong Kong. Overall, this line of research has produced interesting results in terms of how language encoding corresponds to collective human behavior changes.…”