Abstract
Using the social measurement method in surveying the sense of language of the Chinese public on zì (the Chinese character) vs. cí (the Chinese word), this paper puts forward the fact that zì and cí co-exist in Chinese but refer to different units respectively. In the public sense of language, zì is the Chinese character unit in correspondence with syllable whereas cí is the language unit in correspondence with foot. But cí in Chinese, as in the sense of language of the Chinese public, is not just the prosodic word, but the basic language unit carrying meaningful information which cannot enter the mental lexicon unless it is syntactically/semantically licensed. This paper briefly describes the working method of the public sense of language measurement. Having done the descriptive statistical analysis and the inferential statistical analysis of the acquired data using SPSS (version 10.0), the results can be used as an important parameter in the study of Chinese Information Processing.
| Keywords: | Chinese; Zì; Cí; the sense of language measurement; statistical analysis; the trend of public sense of language; the fact of Chinese |
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