It Means More if It Sounds Good: Yet Another Hypothesis Concerning the Evolution of Polysemous Words

Abstract

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.