Degree Infinitival Clauses

I discuss the structure and semantic composition of the so-called "Attributive-with-Infinitive" construction -- a construction that contains a positive gradable adjective in the attributive position, and a gapped infinitival clause. Studying the way the adjective combines with the infinitival clause will suggest a new type of an infinitival clause -- a degree interval-denoting one. The analysis will have consequences for the nature of a positive morpheme

Leverage Points in Modality Shifts: Comparing Language-only and Multimodal Word Representations

Multimodal embeddings aim to enrich the semantic information in neural representations of language compared to text-only models. While different embeddings exhibit different applicability and performance on downstream tasks, little is known about the systematic representation differences attributed to the visual modality. Our paper compares word embeddings from three vision-and-language models (CLIP, OpenCLIP and Multilingual CLIP) and three text-only models, with static (FastText) as well as contextual representations (multilingual BERT; XLM-RoBERTa). This is the first large-scale study of the effect of visual grounding on language representations, including 46 semantic parameters. We identify meaning properties and relations that characterize words whose embeddings are most affected by the inclusion of visual modality in the training data; that is, points where visual grounding turns out most important. We find that the effect of visual modality correlates most with denotational semantic properties related to concreteness, but is also detected for several specific semantic classes, as well as for valence, a sentiment-related connotational property of linguistic expressions.Comment: Accepted for StarSEM 202

Leverage Points in Modality Shifts:Comparing Language-only and MultimodalWord Representations

Multimodal embeddings aim to enrich the semantic information in neural representations of language compared to text-only models. While different embeddings exhibit different applicability and performance on downstream tasks, little is known about the systematic representation differences attributed to the visual modality. Our paper compares word embeddings from three vision-and-language models (CLIP, OpenCLIP and Multilingual CLIP, Radford et al. 2021; Ilharco et al. 2021; Carlsson et al. 2022) and three text-only models, with static (FastText, Bojanowski et al., 2017) as well as contextual representations (multilingual BERT Devlin et al. 2018; XLM-RoBERTa, Conneau et al. 2019). This is the first large-scale study of the effect of visual grounding on language representations, including 46 semantic parameters. We identify meaning properties and relations that characterize words whose embeddings are most affected by the inclusion of visual modality in the training data; that is, points where visual grounding turns out most important. We find that the effect of visual modality correlates most with denotational semantic properties related to concreteness, but is also detected for several specific semantic classes, as well as for valence, a sentiment-related connotational property of linguistic expressions.</p

A global experiment on motivating social distancing during the COVID-19 pandemic

Finding communication strategies that effectively motivate social distancing continues to be a global public health priority during the COVID-19 pandemic. This cross-country, preregistered experiment (n = 25,718 from 89 countries) tested hypotheses concerning generalizable positive and negative outcomes of social distancing messages that promoted personal agency and reflective choices (i.e., an autonomy-supportive message) or were restrictive and shaming (i.e., a controlling message) compared with no message at all. Results partially supported experimental hypotheses in that the controlling message increased controlled motivation (a poorly internalized form of motivation relying on shame, guilt, and fear of social consequences) relative to no message. On the other hand, the autonomy-supportive message lowered feelings of defiance compared with the controlling message, but the controlling message did not differ from receiving no message at all. Unexpectedly, messages did not influence autonomous motivation (a highly internalized form of motivation relying on one’s core values) or behavioral intentions. Results supported hypothesized associations between people’s existing autonomous and controlled motivations and self-reported behavioral intentions to engage in social distancing. Controlled motivation was associated with more defiance and less long-term behavioral intention to engage in social distancing, whereas autonomous motivation was associated with less defiance and more short- and long-term intentions to social distance. Overall, this work highlights the potential harm of using shaming and pressuring language in public health communication, with implications for the current and future global health challenges

A multi-country test of brief reappraisal interventions on emotions during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The COVID-19 pandemic has increased negative emotions and decreased positive emotions globally. Left unchecked, these emotional changes might have a wide array of adverse impacts. To reduce negative emotions and increase positive emotions, we tested the effectiveness of reappraisal, an emotion-regulation strategy that modifies how one thinks about a situation. Participants from 87 countries and regions (n = 21,644) were randomly assigned to one of two brief reappraisal interventions (reconstrual or repurposing) or one of two control conditions (active or passive). Results revealed that both reappraisal interventions (vesus both control conditions) consistently reduced negative emotions and increased positive emotions across different measures. Reconstrual and repurposing interventions had similar effects. Importantly, planned exploratory analyses indicated that reappraisal interventions did not reduce intentions to practice preventive health behaviours. The findings demonstrate the viability of creating scalable, low-cost interventions for use around the world

A global experiment on motivating social distancing during the COVID-19 pandemic

Finding communication strategies that effectively motivate social distancing continues to be a global public health priority during the COVID-19 pandemic. This cross-country, preregistered experiment (n = 25,718 from 89 countries) tested hypotheses concerning generalizable positive and negative outcomes of social distancing messages that promoted personal agency and reflective choices (i.e., an autonomy-supportive message) or were restrictive and shaming (i.e. a controlling message) compared to no message at all. Results partially supported experimental hypotheses in that the controlling message increased controlled motivation (a poorly-internalized form of motivation relying on shame, guilt, and fear of social consequences) relative to no message. On the other hand, the autonomy-supportive message lowered feelings of defiance compared to the controlling message, but the controlling message did not differ from receiving no message at all. Unexpectedly, messages did not influence autonomous motivation (a highly-internalized form of motivation relying on one’s core values) or behavioral intentions. Results supported hypothesized associations between people’s existing autonomous and controlled motivations and self-reported behavioral intentions to engage in social distancing: Controlled motivation was associated with more defiance and less long-term behavioral intentions to engage in social distancing, whereas autonomous motivation was associated with less defiance and more short- and long-term intentions to social distance. Overall, this work highlights the potential harm of using shaming and pressuring language in public health communication, with implications for the current and future global health challenges

On “zero” and semantic plurality

We discuss the semantics of prenominal “zero”, as in “I have zero new emails in my inbox”. We show that “zero” is not a quantifier like “no” and that giving “zero” a regular numeral semantics is possible and desirable. We formulate such an analysis and its consequences. We show that the existence of a zero numeral has profound consequences for linguistic semantics. We conclude that the fact that languages allow ascription of zero quantity to an entity provides evidence that linguistic semantics has access to what at first sight may seem like an ontological oddity: an entity with zero quantity. In other words, we will show that studying “zero” can inform us about the underlying semantic ontology of natural language

The driving forces of polarity-sensitivity: Experiments with multilingual pre-trained neural language models

Polarity-sensitivity is a typologically general linguistic phenomenon. We focus on negative polarity items (NPIs, e.g. English 'any') -- expressions that are licensed only in negative contexts. The relevant notion of 'negative context' could be defined lexically, syntactically or semantically. There is psycholinguistic evidence in favour of semantics as a driving factor for some NPIs in a couple of languages (Chemla, Homer, &amp; Rothschild, 2011; Denić, Homer, Rothschild, &amp; Chemla, 2021). Testing the scale of this analysis as a potential cross-linguistic universal experimentally is extremely hard. We turn to recent multilingual pre-trained language models -- multilingual BERT (Devlin, Chang, Lee, &amp; Toutanova, 2018) and XLM-RoBERTa (Conneau et al., 2019) -- and evaluate the models' recognition of polarity-sensitivity and its cross-lingual generality. Further, using the artificial language learning paradigm, we look for the connection in neural language models between semantic profiles of expressions and their ability to license NPIs. We find evidence for such connection for negation but not for other items we study

Numeral Typology Database

The database is a description of grammatical (derivational and morphosyntactic) properties of about 18,000 numerals in 37 genetically and geographically diverse languages