Second edition

§ 2. Frequency, Polysemy and Structure

The interdependence of various features of the word may be easily observed through a comparative analysis of these aspects in relation to any chosen individual feature. Thus choosing, for example, the semantic structure as a starting point we observe that there is a certain interdependence between the number of meanings in a word and its structural and derivational type, its etymological character, its stylistic reference. The analysis may start with any other aspect of the word — its structure, style or origin — it will generally reveal the same type of interdependence of all the aspects. Words of highest frequency, those that come into the first 2000 of most frequently occurring words all tend to be polysemantic and structurally simple. It should be noted, however, that structure and etymology by themselves are not
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always indicative of other aspects of the word — simple words are not necessarily polysemantic, words that etymologically belong to late borrowings may be simple in structure. Frequency most clearly reflects the close interconnection between polysemy and the structure of the word. The higher the frequency, the more polysemantic is the word, the simpler it is in structure. The latest data of linguistic investigation show that the number of meanings is inversely proportional to the number of morphemes the word consists of. Derived and compound words rarely have high frequency of occurrence and are rarely polysemantic. Comparison of the words, members of the same word-cluster, for example heart — hearty — heartily — heartless — heartiness-heartsick shows that it is the simple word of the cluster heart that is marked by the highest frequency (it belongs to the first 500 most frequently occurring words). We also find that the word is highly polysemantic, heart has 6 meanings.¹ Other members of the cluster which are all polymorphic and complex have fewer meanings and many of them are practically monosemantic, e.g. hearty has 3 meanings, heartily — 2 and the rest only 1. All of these words have much lower frequences as compared with the simple member of the cluster — heartily belongs to the 6th thousand, heartless to the 13th, heartiness and heartsick to the 20th thousand.
The same is observed in the simple word man having 9 meanings and polymorphic derived words manful, manly, manliness which have only one meaning, etc. Thus the interdependence of frequency, polysemy and structure manifests itself not only in the morphemic structure of the word, but also in its derivational structure. Derived words are as a rule poorer in the number of meanings and have much lower frequencies than the corresponding simple words though they may be morphemically identical It may be very well exemplified by nouns and verbs formed by conversion, e.g. the simple noun hand has 15 meanings while the derived verb (to) hand has only one meaning and covers only 4% of the total occurrences of both.²