A statistical argument for the homophony avoidance approach to the disyllabification of Chinese

Under the homophone avoidance (HA) theory (Guo 1928, Wang 1944, Karlgren 1949, Lü 1963, Li and Thompson 1981), monosyllabic words are disyllabified to avoid homophonous ambiguities. Lü 1963 predicts that the more monosyllabic homophones there are in a language, the more likely disyllabic words would be created. Duanmu 1999 argues against the HA approach and claims that no supporting evidence has been found in Chinese.This paper argues for the HA approach and provides supporting evidence from corpora of Mandarin Chinese and Cantonese. Our discoveries support the HA motivation for the disyllabification of Chinese. Additionally, the HA theory applies cross-linguistically. The HA theory has interesting implications about the disyllabification of Chinese from a diachronic perspective, which are supposed to accompany the simplification of syllable structures in archaic Chinese.