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

Lucia Vlášková, Mojmír Dočekal


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.
Anthology ID:
2020.mwe-1.4
Volume:
Proceedings of the Joint Workshop on Multiword Expressions and Electronic Lexicons
Month:
December
Year:
2020
Address:
online
Editors:
Stella Markantonatou, John McCrae, Jelena Mitrović, Carole Tiberius, Carlos Ramisch, Ashwini Vaidya, Petya Osenova, Agata Savary
Venue:
MWE
SIG:
SIGLEX
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
27–31
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.mwe-1.4
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Lucia Vlášková and Mojmír Dočekal. 2020. Scalar vs. mereological conceptualizations of the N-BY-N and NUM-BY-NUM adverbials. In Proceedings of the Joint Workshop on Multiword Expressions and Electronic Lexicons, pages 27–31, online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Scalar vs. mereological conceptualizations of the N-BY-N and NUM-BY-NUM adverbials (Vlášková & Dočekal, MWE 2020)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.mwe-1.4.pdf