Title: Character Distributions of Classical Chinese Literary Texts: Zipf's Law, Genres, and Epochs,
Abstract: We collect 14 representative corpora for major periods in Chinese history in
this study. These corpora include poetic works produced in several dynasties,
novels of the Ming and Qing dynasties, and essays and news reports written in
modern Chinese. The time span of these corpora ranges between 1046 BCE and 2007
CE. We analyze their character and word distributions from the viewpoint of the
Zipf's law, and look for factors that affect the deviations and similarities
between their Zipfian curves. Genres and epochs demonstrated their influences
in our analyses. Specifically, the character distributions for poetic works of
between 618 CE and 1644 CE exhibit striking similarity. In addition, although
texts of the same dynasty may tend to use the same set of characters, their
character distributions still deviate from each other.