Diachronic Changes and Multi-dimensional Quantitative Analysis of Sentence Complexity in Contemporary Chinese Written Language

Using the corpus of People’s Daily from 1946 to 2015 as our data, this paper conducts a quantitative study on sentence complexity based on average length, dispersion, fragmentation and lexical density to investigate its historical changes. This paper also aims to conduct a multi-dimensional analysis on the correlation between sentence complexity and structure or function. Our results reveal that the trend of sentence complexity changes from stable to a rise. The amount of verbs in a sentence has a strong positive correlation with sentence length and fragmentation. Emotional value has a positive correlation with average sentence length, as well as dispersion of sentence lengths. The proportion of interrogative sentences is negatively correlated with average sentence length. Furthermore, the proportion of exclamatory sentences is negatively correlated with lexical density, while the proportion of declarative sentences positively correlates with lexical density.