Scalar vs. mereological conceptualizations of the N- BY -N and NUM - BY - NUM adverbials (2020)

Abstract: The multiword adverbials N-BY-N and NUM-BY-NUM (as English “brick by brick” and “one by one”, respectively) are event modifiers which require temporal sequencing of the event they modify into a linearly ordered series of sub-events. Previous studies unified these two constructions under a single semantic analysis and adopted either a mereological or a scalar approach. However, based on a corpus study examining new Slavic language material and a binomial logistic regression modelling of the manually annotated data, we argue that two separate analyses are needed to account for these constructions, namely a scalar analysis for the N-BY-N construction and a mereological one for the NUM-BY-NUM construction.

## background sentences in (1) both contain constructions traditionally analyzed as adverbials consisting of multiple words. in @xcite , it is a so-called n-by-n construction, where two identical nouns are connected by a preposition; in (1-b), a so-called num-by-num construction, where a preposition connects two numerals. it is these multiword adverbials, their semantic analysis and a new formal description that will be the focus of this paper. ## excerpting and modelling in this section, we will focus on the excerpting and further handling of the data, as well as describing the process of statistical modelling. we worked with the czech national corpus @xcite , which has approximately 120 million tokens. firstly, all the n-by-n and num-by-num occurrences were extracted via cql and regex queries foot_0 which resulted in 2 264 and 537 hits, respectively. an example of two such occurences is in (3). the occurrences were randomized and then a manageable number of them was selected to be annotated later. overall, we were working with 300 num-by-num and 600 n-by-n constructions (the unequal number of selected constructions illustrates the unequal number of natural occurences). ubíral walked-on.3sg se refl blok block.masc.a za after blokem block.masc.inst dál. farther 'he walked on block by block.' n-by-n b. němci germans zapalovali lit.on.fire.pl bloky blocks.masc.a jeden one.masc.n za after druhým. second.masc.inst 'the germans lit the blocks on fire one by one.' num-by-num the annotation was carried out manually and each sentence was judged by 4 criteria listed below, all with their respective factor names used later in the statistical model. after the tagging, we fitted a logistic regression model foot_2 and a generalized linear model foot_3 to recognize which of the 4 factors that differentiate between the two constructions are really distinctive. our hypothesis was that speakers choose between using either the n-by-n or the num-by-num adverbial on the basis of their conceptualization of the given event. if they view the sequence of subevents from the mereological perspective, they tend to use the num-by-num construction. on the other hand, the n-by-n construction is chosen for scalar perspectives. in both logistic models, the response variable was construction and the 4 criteria were the predictors (of factor type). the lrm() model reported outstanding discrimination: the concordance index @xmath0.902. the two distinguishing predictors, antecedent and predicatetype, show very similar strength. moreover, the odds of the n-by-n vs. num-by-num construction (the latter was the reference level) in sentences without an antecedent are approximately 38, and in sentences with scalar verbs are approximately 37, thus the odds are similar as well. this shows us that in sentences with clear antecedent and non-scalar verb, speakers strongly tend to select the num-by-num construction, whereas in sentences with a scalar verb and without antecedent they strongly prefer the n-by-n adverbial. the two other factors are statistically non-significant.