Quantitative Analysis of Morphology-Meaning Synergy in Chinese: Implications for Morphological Modeling and Genre Classification

The synergetic relationship between morphology and meaning in Chinese remains underexplored. Based on the Lancaster Corpus of Mandarin Chinese, we quantitatively analyze the structure of Chinese words by adopting the method of information theory, exploring the interaction between the structural complexity of words (SCW) and polysemy. We also assessed the model parameters’ effectiveness in distinguishing different genres and the textual characteristics reflected by these parameters. The results indicate that, first, an inverse correlation exists between SCW and polysemy (but the increase of one will not cause the infinite reduction of the other), and the model [Formula: see text][Formula: see text]Ax[Formula: see text][Formula: see text][Formula: see text][Formula: see text][Formula: see text]effectively captures this relationship. Second, parameters [Formula: see text] and [Formula: see text] reveal differences in lexical forms between ”narrative” and ”expository” texts, with higher values of [Formula: see text] and [Formula: see text] suggesting a tendency toward expository functions; parameter [Formula: see text] reflects distinctions in meaning clarity between the two types of texts, with higher values of [Formula: see text] suggesting a tendency toward narrative functions. Beyond elucidating the interaction mechanism between lexical forms and meanings, our study provides insights into the automatic recognition and classification of texts, as well as into the quantification of lexical morphology and the development of morphological models in other analytic languages.