An Investigation on Polysemy and Lexical Organization of Verbs
نویسندگان
چکیده
This work investigates lexical organizat ion of verbs looking at the influence of some linguistic factors on the process of lexical acquisition and use. Among the factors that may play a role in acquisition, in this paper we investigate the influence of polysemy. We examine data obtained from psycholinguistic action naming tasks performed by children and adults (speakers of Brazilian Portuguese), and analyze some characteristics of the verbs used by each group in terms of similarity of content, using Jaccard‟s coefficient, and of topology, using graph theory. The experiments suggest that younger children tend to use more polysemic verbs than adults to describe events in the world.
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