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Article published In: Language and Linguistics
Vol. 26:4 (2025) ► pp.595–621

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Automatic detection of phonological change in Chinese rhymed corpora

ORCiD logo with link | School of Oriental and African Studies, London
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Available under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.

Published online: 28 July 2025
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https://doi.org/10.1075/lali.00246.bal
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, Julien. 2022. Leveraging graph algorithms to speed up the annotation of large rhymed corpora. Cahiers de Linguistique – Asie Orientale 51(1). 46–80. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar. 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 Harvard University & Academia Sinica & Peking University. 2021. China Biographical Database. ([URL]) (Accessed 2025-05-07.) 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.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Evolving rhyming practices as community change
  • 3.Community change detection algorithm
  • 4.Concrete process
    • 4.1Corpus segmentation
    • 4.2Sub-corpus rhyme communities
    • 4.3Applying the rhyme community change detection algorithm
  • 5.Case study
  • 6.Discovering all splits & mergers
    • 6.1Noise and remedies
  • 7.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • List of abbreviations
  • References
References (17)
References
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