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. Here we focus on a couple of them: 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. Here we evaluate the robustness of these laws in contexts where they have not been explored yet to our knowledge. The recovery of the laws again in new conditions provides support for the hypothesis that they originate from abstract mechanisms.
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Acknowledgments
The authors thank Pedro Delicado and the reviewers for their helpful comments. This research work has been supported by the SGR2014-890 (MACDA) project of the Generalitat de Catalunya, and MINECO project APCOM (TIN2014-57226-P) from Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad, Spanish Government.
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Hernández-Fernández, A., Casas, B., Ferrer-i-Cancho, R., Baixeries, J. (2016). Testing the Robustness of Laws of Polysemy and Brevity Versus Frequency. In: Král, P., Martín-Vide, C. (eds) Statistical Language and Speech Processing. SLSP 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9918. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-45925-7_2
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