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This dissertation explores prototypicality and salience effects of the vari-ation within the Chinese ideophonic lexicon. Chinese is demonstrated tohave ideophones, by unifying previously separately studied phenomenasuch as reduplication, binomes, and onomatopoeia. However, the “ideo-phonic lexicon” is not homogeneous; rather, it is prototypically structured.This is demonstrated from a synchronic and diachronic perspective, as wellas across different modalities, with special attention devoted to the writtenmodality. Thus, this dissertation aims to address the lacunae within theliterature on ideophones, in which Chinese is often underrepresented,diachronic perspectives are scarce, and the ideophonic usage of writing isoften neglected.

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Ever since the end of the 19th century, there has been a renewed research interest into a group of prosaic reformers living during the Tang and Song dynasties. This movement has been given the name 'Classical Prose Movement' (guwen yundong), referring to writers like Han Yu, Liu Zongyuan, Li Hua, Liang Su, Li Ao, Xiao Yingshi etc. They claimed that their works are based on the prose found in old texts (hence Classical prose), using their literary style and employing the same ideological terminology to refer to the cultural values of their time. It has been widely recognised in frameworks found in Chinese as well as Western research that by using qualitative and intuitive methods, one can indeed see how these writers applied the same terminology, but by doing so changed these terms' meanings.The approach of this master thesis is not qualitative, but rather quantitative, looking to answer the questions whether it is possible to compose a statistical list which one can use to discern guwen texts from other texts, and whether it is possible to see more intricately which texts have been influenced by which other texts. Using stylometric methods and the software programme R, this paper analyses a linguistic corpus, that consists of: 1) the old texts guwen writers are supposed to imitate; 2) pianwen texts, a genre guwen writers claim is too full of frivolities instead of content and thus should be regarded as a kind of anti-guwen; 3) guwen texts of the Tang dynasty; 4) guwen texts of the Song dynasty; 5) Buddhist texts, because the Buddhist church was very popular during these dynasties, presumably influencing the guwen writers as well. After drawing a list of the most frequent 100 single characters (unigrams) encountered in the Tang and Song guwen subcorpus, these tokens are used to compare similarities and dissimilarities of the samples found in the whole corpus. This approach is repeated twice for the most frequent 100 combinations of two (bigrams) and respectively t...

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Linguistics