Information-theoretic laws suggest that words with similar meanings should be more phonetically distinct than words with different meanings, to avoid confusion. On the other hand, morphological processes like derivation and phonological processes like onomatopoeia produce the opposite effect (e.g., two words from the same morphological root typically have both similar meanings and similar pronunciation).
The goal of this thesis will be to investigate how the phonological organization of the lexicon correlates with its semantic organization. For example, you could produce a semantic embedding space and a phonological embedding space and see how different pairs of words behave in the two spaces. It could also be instructive to explore how these properties differ across typologically different languages.
- Damián E. Blasi, Søren Wichmann, Harald Hammarström, Peter F. Stadler, and Morten H. Christiansen. Sound–meaning association biases evidenced across thousands of languages. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 113(39):10818–10823, September 2016.
- Isabelle Dautriche, Kyle Mahowald, Edward Gibson, and Steven T. Piantadosi. Wordform similarity increases with semantic similarity: An analysis of 100 languages. Cogn. Sci., 41(8): 2149–2169, 2017.
- Andrei Kutuzov. Arbitrariness of linguistic sign questioned: correlation between word form and meaning in Russian. Komp'yuternaya Lingvistika i Intellektual'nye Tekhnologii 16(23): 109-120.