It Means More if It Sounds Good: Yet Another Hypothesis Concerning the Evolution of Polysemous Words
This addresses a linguistic evolution problem for researchers, but appears incremental as it builds on existing hypotheses and methods.
The paper investigates language evolution by examining connections between word structural properties and polysemy in English, empirically demonstrating that words easier to pronounce tend to have multiple meanings using Ollivier-Ricci curvature on a synonym graph.
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.