Modelling Italian Construction Flexibility with Distributional Semantics: Are Constructions Enough?
Authors: Lucia Busso, Ludovica Pannitto, Alessandro Lenci (Università di Pisa, 2018)
Topic: Lexical and Semantic Resources and Analysis

Abstract
The present study combines psycholinguistic evidence on Italian valency coercion and a distributional analysis. The paper suggests that distributional properties can provide useful insights on how general abstract constructions inﬂuence the resolution of coercion effects. However, complete understanding of the processing and recognition of coercion requires to take into consideration the complex intertwining of lexical verb and abstract constructions.

Introduction
In Construction Grammar (Goldberg, 2006), the basic units of linguistic analysis are called constructions (Cxns), form-meaning pairings associated with autonomous, non-compositional abstract meanings, independently from the lexical items occurring in them. Examples of Cxns range from morphemes (e.g., pre-, -ing), to ﬁlled or partiallyﬁlled complex words (e.g., daredevil) to idioms (e.g., give the devil his dues) to more abstract patterns like the Ditransitive [Subj V Obj1 Obj2] (e.g., he gave her a book) (Goldberg, 2006). Cxns appear at any level of linguistic analysis, but the level at which the notion of constructional meaning represents a radical departure from other theories of grammar is argument structure. These Cxns, such as the English Ditransitive, are claimed to be associated with an abstract semantic content. In this case, constructional meaning can be paraphrased as X CAUSES Y TO RECEIVE Z. One of the main supporting arguments in favour of constructions as independent and primitive objects of grammar is the ﬂexibility with which argument Cxns and verbs interact with each other, as in example (1) in which the original intransitive sense of “to sneeze” is overridden by the Caused Motion Cxn, and thus takes a transitive sense of “making something move by sneezing”. (1) John sneezed the napkin off the table This ﬂexibility in combining Cxns and verbs is known as valency coercion (Michaelis, 2004; Boas, 2011; Lauwers and Willems, 2011; Perek and Hilpert, 2014). This phenomenon, although vastly addressed for English, has not yet received a systematic investigation in other languages. For notable exceptions, see Boas and Gonzálvez-García (2014). In particular – to the best of our knowledge – no previous attempt to carry out an empirical investigation of valency coercion exists for Italian. However, even a simple corpus query reveals that the phenomenon is present in Italian, though it is not as pervasive as in English: (2) Tossì una risata leggera tra i suoi capelli (He coughed a light laugh in her hair) [ItWac] This paper presents an analysis of Italian constructional ﬂexibility that combines psycholinguistic and computational evidence: ﬁrst, we present the results of a behavioral experiment on valency coercion. Then, we model Cxns with distributional semantics to investigate whether the semantic shape of Italian argument Cxns can affect the interpretation and processing of coerced sentences.

Conclusion
These ﬁndings support our claim that coercion effects are resolved by a dynamic interrelation between verb and Cxn (Kemmer, 2008; Kemmer and Yoon, 2013). Even though frequency effects are shown to affect Cxns extensibility to new items (Bybee, 2006), our results suggest that type and token frequency only facilitate the distinction between semantically incompatible and partially compatible formulations, whereas higher coercibility is only affected by semantic density. We interpret this ﬁnding in light of the upward strengthening hypothesis (Hilpert, 2015), according to which a novel occurrence of a linguistic unit strengthens a superior node (i.e., the abstract Cxn) only if the former is categorized ‘as an instance of a more abstract Cxn. If this categorization is not performed, or only superﬁcially so, no upward strengthening will take place’ (Hilpert, 2015, p.38). Higher coercibility is hence not affected by frequency of the Cxn because of the ‘intermediate’ grammaticality level of coercion, which does not allow unambiguous categorization. Coercion sentences result more natural if the target Cxn is observed with verbs belonging to similar semantic classes or subclasses, which increases Cxn semantic density. We could therefore assume that coercion effects in Italian elicit a partial categorization. The effect of semantic density, however, only explains part of the data. In fact, visual inspection of the relation between semantic density and the estimates of table 3 reveals that this effect does not explain the high coercibility of IM, or the low values of CO Cxns (see Figure 5). Figure 5: relation semantic density- estimates All things considered, semantic properties (modelled with distributional vectors) of Cxns (e.g., its density) are only one of the factors inﬂuencing speakers processing and recognition of coercion effects. In fact, it has been argued that Romance languages are more valency driven than English (and Germanic languages in general) (Perek and Hilpert, 2014). The results of both experiments provide substantial evidence for an integrated account of Italian coercion effects, which should consider not only the properties of the general abstract Cxn, but rather the interaction of the mismatching verb with Cxn meaning. These result also have interesting implications to understand the cognitive mechanisms underlying Cxn ﬂexibility and productivity. In fact, these ﬁndings support the idea that Cxn meaning is abstracted from the semantics of prototypically occurring verbs. As we saw, several studies have argued in favour of this hypothesis for English, but the fact that we were able to adapt it to Italian suggests that the factors driving the acquisition of Cxns are - at least partially - not language-speciﬁc but rather general cognitive processes.