Polysemy and synonymy in syntactic dependency networks

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).

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