  Classical Chinese is a language notable for its word class flexibility: the
same word may often be used as a noun or a verb. Bisang (2008) claimed that
Classical Chinese is a precategorical language, where the syntactic position of
a word determines its part-of-speech category. In this paper, we apply
entropy-based metrics to evaluate these claims on historical corpora. We
further explore differences between nouns and verbs in Classical Chinese: using
psycholinguistic norms, we find a positive correlation between concreteness and
noun usage. Finally, we align character embeddings from Classical and Modern
Chinese, and find that verbs undergo more semantic change than nouns.

Computation and Language