Ground promotion and complex particle constructions in Norwegian

Petter Haugereid — Mon, 15 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0200

This paper presents an HPSG analysis of Norwegian particle constructions with Ground promotion, as exemplified in (1), where av ‘off’ functions as a particle and the object bordet ‘the table’ is a Ground argument.

(1) Jeg rydder AV bordet.
I clear off table.DEF
‘I clear the table.’

It will be shown that the Ground promotion construction has similarities with both regular particle constructions and constructions with selected prepositions, and an analysis will be presented where Ground promotion is assumed to be a combination of these two constructions, viz. a complex particle construction. The analysis is implemented in a bidirectional typed feature structure grammar, and it will demonstrate that unification and type inheritance facilitates the merger of two constructions into one, while simultaneously allowing them to be kept apart.

In search of semantic distance: metaphoric and non-metaphoric constructions in static and contextual representations

Mojca Brglez, Špela Vintar — Mon, 15 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0200

Phrases such as burning question, digital waste or invasion of technology are relatively ordinary expressions understood by any speaker of English. While diverse in structure and meaning, they demonstrate a semantic tension between the basic meanings of a metaphoric and a non-metaphoric constituent. Albeit frequent in discourse, they remain a challenge for automatic language processing systems, especially for smaller, less represented languages. In this work, we inspect a broad array of language models to embed noun phrases in Slovene and investigate the potential of word embeddings to identify metaphoric phrases via the semantic distance of its constituents as measured via cosine similarity. The study shows both static and contextual monolingual embeddings encode relevant semantic information while multilingual embeddings demonstrate no significant effect in this experimental setting. Moreover, the study unravels the most effective layers for basic meaning representation and highlights the influence of other, non-semantic factors on cosine similarity. By shedding light on these mechanisms, the study provides new insights for both metaphor processing and our understanding of the inner workings of language models.

Journal of Language Modelling

Ground promotion and complex particle constructions in Norwegian

In search of semantic distance: metaphoric and non-metaphoric constructions in static and contextual representations