Word Patterns in Chinese Government Speeches: A 21-Year Look

In the world of language studies, Zipf's law is a big deal. It's all about how often words show up in texts. A recent study dug into this topic by looking at 651 work reports from Chinese provincial governments, spanning 21 years from 2003 to 2023. The goal was to see if these reports follow Zipf's law, which says that the most common word appears twice as often as the second most common word, three times as often as the third most common word, and so on. To figure this out, researchers used some fancy tools. They broke down the text using a method called Jieba word segmentation, with a special dictionary to make sure they got it right. Then, they used a double-logarithmic regression model to analyze the word frequency distributions. The results were pretty clear. The Zipf coefficient, which measures how well the text follows Zipf's law, was close to 1. This means that, for the most part, these government reports do follow the law. But here's where it gets interesting. The Zipf coefficient didn't stay the same over the 21 years. It had some ups and downs, with a big change around 2011. After that year, it started going up steadily. Why the change? Well, that's around the time of the 18th National Congress of the Communist Party of China. This event marked a shift towards more uniform and centralized policy communication. So, it's likely that this change in political communication style is what caused the shift in the Zipf coefficient. Now, let's talk about regional differences. The study looked at provinces in the east, center, west, and northeast of China. Turns out, there aren't big differences in the Zipf coefficients among these regions. But, centrally governed municipalities, like Beijing and Shanghai, have higher Zipf coefficients than other provincial-level regions. This could be because these municipalities have more standardized language use in their official documents. However, the study isn't perfect. It only looked at provincial-level reports, leaving out prefecture- and county-level ones. This means the findings might not apply to all levels of government. Plus, the study only looked at China. It would be interesting to see if the same patterns show up in other countries or cultures. There's also more to explore in the world of quantitative linguistics. Laws like Heaps' Law and Menzerath's Law could be studied in these government reports too. These laws deal with how vocabulary size grows with text length and how sentence length affects word length, respectively. So, there's plenty more to discover in the language of Chinese government speeches.