The Contextual Variability of English Nouns: The Impact of Categorical Specificity beyond Conceptual Concreteness
Year: 2024
Type: conference-paper
Abstract: Research on conceptual abstraction has investigated the differences in contextual distributions, or "contextual variability," of abstract and concrete concept words (e.g., love vs. cat).Empirical studies on this topic show that abstract words tend to occur in diverse linguistic contexts, while concrete words are typically constrained within more homogeneous contexts.Nonetheless, these investigations have somewhat overlooked a factor that influences both abstract and concrete concepts: Categorial Specificity, which denotes the inclusiveness of a category (e.g., ragdoll vs. mammal).We argue that more specific words are tied to narrower domains, independently or whether they are concrete or abstract, thus resulting in a diminished degree of contextual variability when compared to generic terms.In this study, we used distributional models to investigate the interplay between contextual variability, concreteness, specificity, and their interaction.Analyzing 676 English nouns, we found that contextual variability is explained by both concreteness and specificity: more specific words have closer contexts, while generic words, whether abstract or concrete, exhibit less related contexts.
Authors: Giulia Rambelli, Marianna Bolognesi
Institution: University of Bologna
Language: English
Subfield: Language and Linguistics
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
Funder: European Commission
OpenAlex ID: W7131859870