Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item:
http://bura.brunel.ac.uk/handle/2438/28948
Full metadata record
DC Field | Value | Language |
---|---|---|
dc.contributor.author | Han, SJ | - |
dc.contributor.author | Kelly, P | - |
dc.contributor.author | Winters, J | - |
dc.contributor.author | Kemp, C | - |
dc.date.accessioned | 2024-05-07T15:18:40Z | - |
dc.date.available | 2024-05-07T15:18:40Z | - |
dc.date.issued | 2022-12-02 | - |
dc.identifier | ORCiD: James Winters https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2982-2991 | - |
dc.identifier | ORCiD: Charles Kemp https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9683-8737 | - |
dc.identifier.citation | Han, S.J. et al. (2022) 'Simplification Is Not Dominant in the Evolution of Chinese Characters', Open Mind, 6, pp. 264 - 279. doi: 10.1162/opmi_a_00064. | en_US |
dc.identifier.uri | https://bura.brunel.ac.uk/handle/2438/28948 | - |
dc.description | Code and data are available at https://github.com/cskemp/chinesecharacters. | en_US |
dc.description | The preregistration is available at https://aspredicted.org/x76et.pdf. | - |
dc.description.abstract | Linguistic systems are hypothesised to be shaped by pressures towards communicative efficiency that drive processes of simplification. A longstanding illustration of this idea is the claim that Chinese characters have progressively simplified over time. Here we test this claim by analyzing a dataset with more than half a million images of Chinese characters spanning more than 3,000 years of recorded history. We find no consistent evidence of simplification through time, and contrary to popular belief we find that modern Chinese characters are higher in visual complexity than their earliest known counterparts. One plausible explanation for our findings is that simplicity trades off with distinctiveness, and that characters have become less simple because of pressures towards distinctiveness. Our findings are therefore compatible with functional accounts of language but highlight the diverse and sometimes counterintuitive ways in which linguistic systems are shaped by pressures for communicative efficiency. | en_US |
dc.description.sponsorship | Funder(s): Australian Research Council Award Id(s): FT190100200 Principal Award Recipient(s): Charles Kemp. | en_US |
dc.format.extent | 264 - 279 | - |
dc.format.medium | Electronic | - |
dc.language | English | - |
dc.language.iso | en_US | en_US |
dc.publisher | MIT Press | en_US |
dc.relation.uri | https://github.com/cskemp/chinesecharacters | - |
dc.relation.uri | https://aspredicted.org/x76et.pdf | - |
dc.rights | Copyright © 2022 Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. For a full description of the license, please visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode. | - |
dc.rights.uri | https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ | - |
dc.subject | Chinese characters | en_US |
dc.subject | cultural evolution | en_US |
dc.subject | communicative efficiency | en_US |
dc.subject | complexity | en_US |
dc.subject | distinctiveness | en_US |
dc.title | Simplification Is Not Dominant in the Evolution of Chinese Characters | en_US |
dc.type | Article | en_US |
dc.date.dateAccepted | 2022-10-10 | - |
dc.identifier.doi | https://doi.org/10.1162/opmi_a_00064 | - |
dc.relation.isPartOf | Open Mind | - |
pubs.publication-status | Published | - |
pubs.volume | 6 | - |
dc.identifier.eissn | 2470-2986 | - |
dc.rights.license | https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode.en | - |
dc.rights.holder | Massachusetts Institute of Technology | - |
Appears in Collections: | Dept of Life Sciences Research Papers |
Files in This Item:
File | Description | Size | Format | |
---|---|---|---|---|
FullText.pdf | Copyright © 2022 Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. For a full description of the license, please visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode. | 2.17 MB | Adobe PDF | View/Open |
This item is licensed under a Creative Commons License