Zipf's Law and Avoidance of Excessive Synonymy

TL;DR

This paper proposes that Zipf's law in language frequency distributions may result from semantic evolution driven by meaning expansion and synonym competition, offering a potential theoretical explanation.

Contribution

It introduces a novel theory linking Zipf's law to semantic evolution, specifically meaning expansion and synonym competition, which had not been previously explained.

Findings

Zipf's law is robust across languages and texts.

Semantic evolution mechanisms can produce Zipf-like distributions.

The proposed theory offers a plausible explanation for the law's universality.

Abstract

Zipf's law states that if words of language are ranked in the order of decreasing frequency in texts, the frequency of a word is inversely proportional to its rank. It is very robust as an experimental observation, but to date it escaped satisfactory theoretical explanation. We suggest that Zipf's law may arise from the evolution of word semantics dominated by expansion of meanings and competition of synonyms.