“Chinese Legal Texts – Quantitative Description” summary (REDONE)

In the article “Chinese Legal Texts – QuantitativeDescription” by Lubos Gajdos, the author analyzes the topic of practical application of linguistic units in legislative acts in the Chinese language. He considers such aspects as the correlation of parts of speech, special syntactical devices, and the size of phrases/sentences.

He claims that there is a correlation between the length of a sentence and the register affiliation – the more formal a text is, the longer the sentences are, and vice versa. For example, it is analyzed that Chinese official documents incline to have about 30 characters.

The next thing under evaluation is the occurrence of certain word classes. The research shows that the most frequent part of speech is noun. Then go verbs, prepositions, non-predicative adjective, adverbs etc. In addition, more precise analysis is concerned with the usage of content and function words. A detailed examination reveals the tendency to apply the measure word that means an article of a law, and the modal verb that indicates the necessity more frequently than the others.

Another trend of legal texts in Chinese is the prevalence of passive voice. It may be either marked or unmarked.  

Ultimately, what Lubos Gajdos is trying to convey through his research is that every language has its own particular means of expressing formal elements, and Chinese is not an exception. He also expects his work to be helpful while studying Chinese legal texts.

I have chosen this article in order to facilitate better comprehension of the Chinese language, to learn more about its peculiar features. While reading it some questions occur:

1.     What nouns appear to be the most frequent?

2.     What materials the author’s research was based on?

Gaidos, Lubos. “Chinese Legal Texts – Quantitative Description” 2017, Acta Linguistica Asiatica, https://rib.li/hWXQ