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

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Submission date: 09. Mar. 2020
Pages: 7
Bibtex
Keywords and phrases: evolution of language, semantic structures, polysemy
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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.