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| Evolution Track of Chinese Poetry Writing: System, Word Class, and Information |
| Pan Xiaxing1, Liu Haitao2 |
1.Chinese Language and Culture College, Huaqiao University, Xiamen 361021, China
2.School of International Studies, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou 310058, China |
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Abstract It is generally believed that after the publication of Hu Shi’s Changshi Ji in March 1920, which is the first new poetry collection written in vernacular Chinese language, a new era was opened up in Chinese poetry writing and it ushered in the period of modern Chinese new poetry writing. Before the publication, the identity of “poetry” is not the core concern in the long history of ancient poetry production, although many changes have been undergone in poetry writing, from gushi poetry (古诗, e.g. The Book of Songs, the first poetry album in China with poems produced during the time from the 11th Century B.C. to the 6th Century B.C.) to sao poetry (骚体诗, e.g. Lisao written by Qu Yuan around 311 B.C.), to jinti poetry (近体诗, many famous poems of this type are written in the Tang Dynasty, 618-907 A.D., and the Song Dynasty, 960-1279 A.D.) and then to the xinti poetry (新体诗, a variable traditional poetry originated in the 19th Century). The emergence of the new poetry written in vernacular Chinese language since 1910s has increasingly become a hot topic for discussion. It is generally believed that the vernacular or modern Chinese new poetry writing is a practice different from that of the traditional mode, and the language system of poetry itself has undergone a relatively complete change. This is almost a radical upheaval in the history of poetry writing. Which force plays a greater role in controlling the evolution of Chinese poetry writing, the evolution of the poetic language system on the objective dimension or the artificial transformation on the subjective one?Poetry language system is a subsystem of language system with its systematic characteristics. The creation of poetry is sensitive to the intensity of information related to language units in poetry. Based on the language of poems of jinti poetry, xinti poetry and modern Chinese new poetry, and combining with the perspectives of system theory and information theory, the concept of entropy in information theory to be specific, this essay makes a study of the information of each word class in the poems from different periods and calculates it via entropy values. Four research questions are discussed: (1) What influence did the expanded information from the language of poetry system have on the evolution of the poetry language system? (2) Can this information be measured? (3) How to measure it? (4) How to evaluate the evolution characteristics of the Chinese poetry language system from the perspective of the changes in the information value of the poetry language system?The linguistic individuality of poetry is further highlighted by the favoring of one or several word classes in poems. It is the selection and control of the total amount of information carried by different word classes, manifested by the entropy value of different word classes in poems that change the systematic structure and speech mode of poetic language. The results show that: Firstly, the total value of word class entropy is generally lower than that of modern Chinese new poetry in terms of the poetic language system of jinti poetry and xinti poetry. Secondly, there is no significant change in the total word class entropy from jinti poetry to xinti poetry. Thirdly, the absolute entropy values of all content words remain stable, but their proportions are different compared with the sum of the entropy values of the rest of the word classes in the poetic language system. Fourthly, the absolute entropy of function words in the system shows completely different characteristics in ancient and modern poetic language systems.The conclusion is that, on the one hand, the poetic revolution in the later decades of the 19th Century, advocated the “revolution” of the “spirit” of poetry, paying attention to the rethinking and in-depth exploration of the content of poetry, and integrating the “new image” into the “old poetic forms”, so as to reform the writing of Chinese poetry. However, such attempts failed to change the nature of poetry creation and break the mold of modern poetry creation. The reason of the failure of the poetic revolution is that the writing of xinti poetry did not take the initiative to break through the balance of language system of modern style poetry writing. The emergence of the new vernacular poetry is the inevitable result of the “inner organizing ability” of the language system to bridge the obvious gap between the poetic language system and the real language system. On the other hand, the information capacity of new vernacular poetry writing has been greatly expanded, which is mainly completed by function words. In a nutshell, the natural evolution of poetic language system plays a more critical role in the game.
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Received: 01 August 2020
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2022, Vol. 52 
