Zipf's Law and Avoidance of Excessive Synonymy

摘要

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