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oa Automatic detection of phonological change in Chinese rhymed corpora
- Source: Language and Linguistics, Volume 26, Issue 4, Oct 2025, p. 595 - 621
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- 30 Oct 2023
- 27 Apr 2024
- 28 Jul 2025
Abstract
Abstract
Large annotated corpora of Chinese rhymed poetry have recently become available, in part due to the development of automatic annotation techniques, such as Baley (2022). The availability of such annotated corpora makes possible the computer-assisted analysis of rhyming practices from a diachronic point of view. This paper proposes to couple such annotated rhymed corpora with the China Biographical Database (CBDB) (2021) to assign individual poems to different time periods and, re-using the concept of rhyme communities, to apply community evolution algorithms in order to follow the changes in the composition of rhyme communities. In the process, I demonstrate that it is possible to highlight rhyme splits and mergers and date those changes. This further allows us to look at sequences of mergers and establish the corresponding chronology of the phonological changes. The code is published so that the approach can be replicated for other periods of the Chinese corpus and adapted to other languages.
