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MiS Preprint
36/2020
It Means More if It Sounds Good: Yet Another Hypotheses Concerning the Evolution of Polysemous Words
Ivan Yamshchikov, Cyrille Merleau Nono Saha, Igor Samenko and Jürgen Jost
Abstract
This position paper looks into the formation of language and shows ties between structural properties of the words in the English language and their polysemy. Using Ollivier-Ricci curvature over a large graph of synonyms to estimate polysemy it shows empirically that the words that arguably are easier to pronounce also tend to have multiple meanings.
evolution of language, semantic structures, polysemy
Related publications
inBook
2020
Repository Open Access
Ivan P. Yamshchikov, Cyrille Merleau Nono, Igor Samenko and Jürgen Jost
It means more if it sounds good : yet another hypothesis concerning the evolution of polysemous words
In: Proceedings of the 5th international conference on complexity, future information systems and risk : COMPLEXIS 2020 ; May 8-9, 2020 ; Volume 1 / Reinhold Behringer... (eds.) Setúbal (Portugal) : SCITEPRESS, 2020. - pp. 143-148
