Work

Resolving inherited ambiguity in Chinese historical phonology with Song dynasty corpus evidence

Year: 2026

Type: article

Abstract: Large digitized corpora and large language models (LLMs) are reshaping how traditional philological evidence can be used in Chinese historical phonology. This study addresses a specific bottleneck: how to systematically resolve inherited ambiguity caused by polyphonic fanqie characters in Qieyun-system rhyme dictionaries. Focusing on Song-dynasty Guǎngyùn and contemporaneous genre-diverse texts, we propose Qieyun System Polyphonic-character Disambiguation (QYSPD), an LLM-assisted pipeline that combines dictionary-internal structure with variant filtering, corpus retrieval, and contextual definition inference. QYSPD infers role-valid primary fanqies and converts branching fanqie ambiguity into explicit primary paths. Posterior dominance analysis shows that most inferred primaries are strongly supported across genres, while genre-conditioned variation is structured by specialized lexical domains. Additional LLM comparison and sensitivity analysis show high primary-assignment agreement and stable JS-distance distributions, supporting the robustness of inference. QYSPD provides a reproducible framework for future work on phonological reconstruction and the diachronic modeling of sound change across periods and sources.

Source: npj Heritage Science

DOI: 10.1038/s40494-026-02919-4

Authors: Haiyue Liu, Hui Xue, Na Nie, Shipeng Zhu

Institutions: Southeast University, Nanjing University

Language: English

Topic: Linguistics and language evolution

Subfield: Language and Linguistics

Field: Arts and Humanities

Domain: Social Sciences

Open Access status: hybrid