Polysemy and word frequency

Abstract

One piece of evidence adduced by George Kingsley Zipf for his eponymous law (Zipf, 1935) and its explanation of the principle of least effort (Zipf, 1949) is the hypothesis that a word's polysemy is proportional to the square root of its frequency (Levelt, 2013). Pawley (2006) following Zipf, also proposes that 'there is a strong general correlation between frequency and the extent of polysemy'. This paper replicates Zipf 's approach but with data drawn from different sources to those available to Zipf, namely, for word frequency, the Kilgarriff most frequent word list drawn from the BNC (Kilgarriff, 1995) and, as a measure of polysemy, the WordNet data for the polysemy of the words in Kilgarriff's list. It also takes note of the syntactic category of lexemes. More advanced statistical modelling is used. Zipf 's observations are confirmed with some provisos. Their utility is examined. Explanations for this relationship remain to be established.

Exploring polysemy in the Academic Vocabulary List: A lexicographic approach

“…A positive relationship between a word's frequency and its meaning senses was first formally posited by Zipf (1945Zipf ( , 1949. In addition to his own research, this relationship has been examined through various operationalisations of 'word frequency' and 'meaning senses' of English words and words in other languages (e.g., Casas et al, 2019;Kuiper et al, 2017).…”

“…This issue has implications for vocabulary learning because being aware that highfrequency words tend to have more meaning senses than low-frequency words can inform language teaching. For example, according to Kuiper et al (2017), a positive relationship between word frequency and the number of word's meaning senses means that language teaching materials for beginner learners should not only include high-frequency English words but also present them in contexts illustrating their different meaning senses.…”

“…Conversely, WordNet is a large online lexical database created within a research project at Princeton University. Focusing on words' lexical and semantic relationships, it is primarily aimed at researchers, and has been extensively used as a resource in studies of polysemy (e.g., Casas et al, 2019, Kuiper et al, 2017.…”

“…This study also addresses a theoretical research gap. Zipf's (1945Zipf's ( , 1949 claim that the more frequent a word is, the more meaning senses it tends to have has received support in relation to general vocabulary both in Zipf's aforementioned publications and others (e.g., Casas, Hernandez-Fernandez, Catala, Ferrer-i-Cancho, & Baixeries, 2019;Kuiper, Fromont, & Gerhard, 2017). However, research on the relationship between academic word frequency and meaning-sense number has not been conducted.…”

Frekwencja czasownika a jego właściwości walencyjne: opis składni eksplikacyjnej w świetle „prawa Mańczaka”

“…Potwierdzenie tej reguły łatwo jest znaleźć w materiale leksykalnym: istnieje zależność między stopniem polisemii wyrazu (liczbą jego różnych znaczeń i odmianek znaczeniowych) a częstością jego występowania (Sambor 1987(Sambor -1988Kuiper et al 2018;Casas et al 2019;Rice et al 2019). A.…”