Polysemy and brevity versus frequency in language

Abstract

The pioneering research of G. K. Zipf on the relationship between word frequency and other word features led to the formulation of various linguistic laws. The most popular is Zipf's law for word frequencies. Here we focus on two laws that have been studied less intensively: the meaning-frequency law, i.e. the tendency of more frequent words to be more polysemous, and the law of abbreviation, i.e. the tendency of more frequent words to be shorter. In a previous work, we tested the robustness of these Zipfian laws for English, roughly measuring word length in number of characters and distinguishing adult from child speech. In the present article, we extend our study to other languages (Dutch and Spanish) and introduce two additional measures of length: syllabic length and phonemic length. Our correlation analysis indicates that both the meaning-frequency law and the law of abbreviation hold overall in all the analyzed languages.

Zipf’s laws of meaning in Catalan

“…Thus, there is new empirical evidence for the weak version of Zipf’s law of meaning distribution on eight languages from different language families (Indo-European, Japonic, Sino-Tibetan and Austronesian), also retrieving exponents of Zipf’s law of meaning distribution ( γ ) between 0.21 and 0.51 depending on the language (see [ 12 ] for details). The results of Bond et al (2019) [ 12 ] are consistent with previous works that they review and that have verified the correlation between the frequency of words and their meanings [ 7 , 15 ] even in child language and language-directed speech [ 13 , 14 ]. In fact, Bond et al (2019) already noted the influence of both binning size and Zipf’s law deviations on the predictive power of the Zipfian laws for the meaning although without considering Eq 4 .…”

Linguistic Laws in Speech: The Case of Catalan and Spanish

“…In future work, a similar approach could be explored within speech, by analyzing in detail whether linguistic regularities emerge both in pauses, interruptions and other elements of acoustic variability and also in prosody, which turn out to be fundamental for example in clinical linguistics [ 55 ]. Finally, in relation to the ontogeny of language, and similarly to recent works which study the evolution of Zipf’s law in language acquisition [ 13 ] as well as the law of brevity [ 56 ], the evolution of linguistic laws in speech is an open problem which also deserves investigation.…”

Hahahahaha, Duuuuude, Yeeessss!: A two-parameter characterization of stretchable words and the dynamics of mistypings and misspellings

“…These distributions tend to generally follow Zipf's brevity law, or law of abbreviation, which states that more frequent words tend to be shorter [31,32]. This law has been found to hold for many different languages, and possibly even for communication between other primates [31][32][33][34][35][36]. However, we find this law is not always strictly followed.…”