Classical Chinese is a language notable for its word class flexibility: the same word may often be used as a noun or a verb. Bisang (2008) claimed that Classical Chinese is a precategorical language, where the syntactic position of a word determines its part-of-speech category. In this paper, we apply entropy-based metrics to evaluate these claims on historical corpora. We further explore differences between nouns and verbs in Classical Chinese: using psycholinguistic norms, we find a positive correlation between concreteness and noun usage. Finally, we align character embeddings from Classical and Modern Chinese, and find that verbs undergo more semantic change than nouns.

中文翻译：

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古汉语词性的演变

文言文是一种以其词类灵活性而著称的语言：同一个词可能经常用作名词或动词。Bisang (2008) 声称古汉语是一种前范畴语言，其中一个词的句法位置决定了它的词性范畴。在本文中，我们应用基于熵的指标来评估这些对历史语料库的声明。我们进一步探讨了古汉语名词和动词之间的差异：使用心理语言学规范，我们发现具体性和名词用法之间存在正相关。最后，我们对齐来自古典和现代汉语的字符嵌入，发现动词比名词经历更多的语义变化。