Seeing through the mess: evolutionary dynamics of lexical polysemy

Abstract

Evidently, words can have multiple senses.For example, the word mess refers to a place to have food or to a confusing situation.How exactly multiple senses emerge is less clear.In this work, we propose and analyze a mathematical model of the evolution of lexical meaning to investigate mechanisms leading to polysemy.This model features factors that have been discussed to impact the semantic processing and transmission of words: word frequency, nonconformism, and semantic discriminability.We formally derive conditions under which a sense of a word tends to diversify itself into multiple senses that coexist stably.The model predicts that diversification is promoted by low frequency, a strong bias for nonconformist usage, and high semantic discriminability.We statistically validate these predictions with historical language data covering semantic developments of a set of English words.Multiple alternative measures are used to operationalize each variable involved, and we confirm the predicted tendencies for twelve combinations of measures.

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