Polysemy and synonymy in syntactic dependency networks. (22nd July 2015)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Čech, Radek; Mačutek, Ján; Žabokrtský, Zdeněk; Horák, Aleš
• Is Part Of: Digital scholarship in the humanties. Volume 32:Number 1(2017)
• Page Start: 36
• Page End: 49
• Publication Date: 2015-07-22
• Subjects: Philology -- Data processing -- Periodicals; Computational linguistics -- Periodicals; 410.285
• DOI: 10.1093/llc/fqv028
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 2055-768X

Abstract

Abstract: The relationship between two important semantic properties (polysemy and synonymy) of language and one of the most fundamental syntactic network properties (a degree of the node) is observed. Based on the synergetic theory of language, it is hypothesized that a word which occurs in more syntactic contexts, i.e. it has a higher degree, should be more polysemous and have more synonyms than a word which occurs in less syntactic contexts, i.e. it has a lesser degree. Six languages are used for hypotheses testing and, tentatively, the hypotheses are corroborated. The analysis of syntactic dependency networks presented in this study brings a new interpretation of the well-known relationship between frequency and polysemy (or synonymy).