Frequency of co-occurrence of chinese characters as an indicator of lexicality (when selecting the vocabulary of chinese military discourse)

Teaching a foreign language in a non-linguistic college or university should be professionally oriented, which brings up the question of selecting the relevant vocabulary of a professional discourse under study. Modern text corpora are too general in subject matter and the time span. Therefore, a specially compiled collection of texts can serve the purpose of selecting the vocabulary. In the case of the Chinese language, the task is complicated by the lack of word segmentation in such texts. Taking into account the fact that most words in Chinese are written in two characters, it is assumed that one of the methods applicable in this situation is a comprehensive frequency analysis of text sequences of two characters – character bigrams. The analysis of frequent bigrams has showed that 70% of the most frequent lexical units are representative of the discourse, including 11% of out-of-vocabulary ones. The remaining part of bigrams pertain to syntactic constructions, including structurally incomplete ones, and fragments of longer lexical units. Thus, the high frequency of character co-occurrence can with a rather high probability (p > 0.7) be considered as an indicator of lexicality in identifying representative vocabulary in an unsegmented the matic collection of texts in Chinese.

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