Morpheme Inversion In Disyllabic Compounds-Cases In Chinese Diachronic Corpora

Morpheme inversion is a significant lexical phenomenon in the evolution of Chinese words, and it poses additional difficulties in Chinese word segmentation, especially in computer processing of Chinese classics. This paper reports a study on the disyllabic morpheme-inverted compounds in the Chinese diachronic corpora from the perspective of natural language processing. The corpora include two pre-Qin classics and four notable novels created in the Ming and Qing dynasties, in which words are segmented and proper nouns are tagged. Based on the full statistics and analysis, a comparative study is carried out on the use of disyllabic morpheme-inverted compounds in the two types of Chinese text, that is, historical works and fictions. Results show that there are many more morpheme-inverted compounds in the Ming-Qing novels than in the pre-Qin classics in terms of both lexical item and frequency. The morpheme-inverted compounds in the Ming-Qing novels are also closer to their modern counterparts.