Making sense of spoken plurals
- URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2207.01947v1
- Date: Tue, 5 Jul 2022 10:44:26 GMT
- Title: Making sense of spoken plurals
- Authors: Elnaz Shafaei-Bajestan and Peter Uhrig and R. Harald Baayen
- Abstract summary: This study focuses on the semantics of noun singulars and their plural inflectional variants in English.
One model (FRACSS) proposes that all singular-plural pairs should be taken into account when predicting plural semantics from singular semantics.
The other model (CCA) argues that conceptualization for plurality depends primarily on the semantic class of the base word.
- Score: 1.80476943513092
- License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/
- Abstract: Distributional semantics offers new ways to study the semantics of
morphology. This study focuses on the semantics of noun singulars and their
plural inflectional variants in English. Our goal is to compare two models for
the conceptualization of plurality. One model (FRACSS) proposes that all
singular-plural pairs should be taken into account when predicting plural
semantics from singular semantics. The other model (CCA) argues that
conceptualization for plurality depends primarily on the semantic class of the
base word. We compare the two models on the basis of how well the speech signal
of plural tokens in a large corpus of spoken American English aligns with the
semantic vectors predicted by the two models. Two measures are employed: the
performance of a form-to-meaning mapping and the correlations between form
distances and meaning distances. Results converge on a superior alignment for
CCA. Our results suggest that usage-based approaches to pluralization in which
a given word's own semantic neighborhood is given priority outperform theories
according to which pluralization is conceptualized as a process building on
high-level abstraction. We see that what has often been conceived of as a
highly abstract concept, [+plural], is better captured via a family of
mid-level partial generalizations.
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