Varying Abstractions: a conceptual vs. distributional view on prepositional polysemy

Lauren Fonteyn

doi:10.5334/gjgl.1323

Abstract

The term ‘meaning’, as it is presently employed in Linguistics, is a polysemous concept, covering a broad range of operational definitions. Focussing on two of these definitions, meaning as ‘concept’ and meaning as ‘context’ (also known as ‘distributional semantics’), this paper explores to what extent these operational definitions lead to converging conclusions regarding the number and nature of distinct senses a polysemous form covers. More specifically, it investigates whether the sense network that emerges from the principled polysemy model of over as proposed by Tyler &amp; Evans (2003; 2001) can be reconstructed by the neural language model BERT. The study assesses whether the contextual information encoded in BERT embeddings can be employed to succesfully (i) recognize the abstract sense categories and (ii) replicate the relative distances between the senses of over proposed in the principled polysemy model. The results suggest that, while there is partial convergence, the two models ultimately lead to different global abstractions because the imagistic information that plays a key role in conceptual approaches to prepositional meaning may not be encoded in contextualized word embeddings.

Highlights

As a first point of enquiry, it is investigated whether Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) recognises the sense categories proposed in the principled polysemy model in a relatively distinct and coherent manner
If the abstract, conceptual sense categories proposed in the principled polysemy model are recognized by BERT, we would expect to find that the geometrical distance between the embeddings of all tokens labelled as Sense 1, for instance, is shorter than the distance between those tokens and tokens with a different category label, forming a cluster
Within Cognitive Linguistics, there has been no shortage of proposals for modelling polysemy networks, in which the syntactic configurations, collocations, and the notion of underlying image schemas are of central concern

Summary

Introduction

In the cognitive-conceptual approach to semantics, meanings are defined as ‘concepts’ which are connected and grounded in complex knowledge structures Some key publications in developing the notion of image schemas and embodiment, and integrating those notions into the discussion of meaning representation, are Brugman (1988) and Lakoff (1987). In their analyses of over, Brugman and Lakoff distinguish a vast number of distinct image schemas, all of which map onto a distinct ‘sense’ of the preposition. The image schema underlying an example such as Devi lives over the hill, for instance, conveys a static horizontal spatial configuration, whereby the focal point or “trajector” (TR), Devi, is positioned on the other side of the “landmark” (LM), the hill. The schema differs from those underlying examples such as Devi walks over the hill or The helicopter flies over (the hill), which involve a (horizontal) path, and so on

Objectives

Results

Conclusion