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A Quantitative Study on the Linguistic Features of the Tujia Epic Sheba Songs
- 1 North Minzu University
* Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Abstract
Previous research on the Tujia epic Sheba Songs has primarily relied on qualitative methods, which are less conducive to objectively examining the text’s features. This paper introduces quantitative research methods to explore the textual characteristics of Sheba Songs and compares its features with those of regulated verse, modern Chinese poetry, and Chinese folk songs. The structure of the study is as follows: (1) From the perspective of word frequency distribution, Zipf’s law is employed to verify the “naturalness” of the Sheba Songs text. (2) From the perspective of part-of-speech probability distribution, clustering indices reveal that, compared to regulated verse, the stylistic features of Sheba Songs are closer to those of modern Chinese poetry. (3) Clustering experiments using relevant clustering indices confirm the inclination of Sheba Songs toward the characteristics of “folk balladization.”
Keywords
Tujia, Sheba Songs, “naturalness”, quantitative analysis
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Cite this article
Xiang,Y. (2024). A Quantitative Study on the Linguistic Features of the Tujia Epic Sheba Songs. Advances in Humanities Research,10,43-52.
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The datasets used and/or analyzed during the current study will be available from the authors upon reasonable request.
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