Zong-qi Cai & Maciej Kurzynski, Journal of Chinese Literature and Culture, 2024 (2), forthcoming.

Integrating traditional Chinese poetics, modern linguistic methods, and computational analysis, this article explores how the pre-Qin Book of Poetry and the Han “Nineteen Old Poems” realized the linguistic-aesthetic ideal “brevity in form and breadth in meaning,” as articulated by Zhong Rong 鍾嶸 (ca. 468–518) in his evaluation of tetrasyllabic and pentasyllabic verses in classical Chinese poetry. We train a large language model to show how the tetrasyllabic Book of Poetry employs topic-comment sentences, in combination with simple subject-predicate sentences, to convey rich content and vivid emotions with minimal word usage. By contrast, the pentasyllabic “Nineteen Old Poems” leverages a flexible line-by-line variation of subject-predicate syntax as well as lexically concrete binomes and three-character noun phrases, establishing an alternative route of lyricism characterized by sustained observation and reflection. The statistical analysis of verb distribution in “Nineteen Old Poems” also demonstrates a persistent preference for verb placement towards the last three characters of the pentasyllabic line (touqing weizhong 頭輕尾重), leading to the formation of a new 2+(1+2/2+1) rhythm unknown to pre-Qin poetry. Through language modeling and traditional literary analysis, our article yields new insights into how Han pentasyllabic poets reinvented vocabulary, syntax, rhythms, and structure and thereby scaled new heights of “brevity in form and breadth in meaning.”