A3 Refereed book chapter or chapter in a compilation book

Distributional Semantics of the Partitive A Argument Construction in Finnish




AuthorsHuumo Tuomas, Kyröläinen Aki-Juhani, Kanerva Jenna, Luotolahti M. Juhani, Salakoski Tapio, Ginter Filip, Laippala Veronika

EditorsMilla Luodonpää-Manni, Esa Penttilä, Johanna Viimaranta

Publishing placeCambridge

Publication year2017

Book title Empirical Approaches to Cognitive Linguistics: Analysing Real-Life Data

Series titleEmpirical Approaches to Cognitive Linguistics

First page 25

Last page48

ISBN978-1-4438-7325-3

Web address http://www.cambridgescholars.com/empirical-approaches-to-cognitive-linguistics(external)


Abstract

In Standard Finnish, the case marking of the S argument in existential clauses alternates between the nominative and the partitive, while A arguments of transitive clauses are always in the nominative. In actual usage, however, the partitive is used occasionally to mark some A arguments as well (the partitive A). We extracted data from the Finnish Internet Parsebank, an ongoing project that crawls the Finnish Internet and gathers massive corpora with an automatic morphological and syntactic analysis. We focus on the properties of the argument structure of the partitive A construction, and present a qualitative analysis for the properties of the A and O arguments and their contribution to the semantics of this particular structure. The role of the verb is then analyzed, with a focus on frequency of use and semantic similarity. We utilize semantic vector models in constructing similarity-based relations among the verbs, and present an analysis of semantic similarity based on the word2vec model. This measure of similarity is based on estimates of co-occurrence of words in the corpus, but it can scale efficiently up to billions of estimates. Overall, the analysis presented shows the niche occupied by the partitive A in the Finnish lexicon and the contribution of individual arguments, frequency of use, and semantic similarity.



Last updated on 2024-26-11 at 13:49