Language Models Learn Constructional Semantics, Not To Mention Syntax: Investigating LM Understanding of Paired-Focus Constructions
Grasping the semantics of rare constructions (form-meaning pairings) has been shown to be a challenging problem that has currently only been solved by the largest LLMs. It remains an open question if open-source models have robust constructional understanding, and if so, what learning dynamics underlie the acquisition of this knowledge. Focusing on a set of rare Paired-Focus constructions in English (e.g. "let alone", "much less"), we construct a novel dataset to test their meanings using both scalar adjectival semantics and general world knowledge. Testing a wide range of models differing in parameter count, architecture, and pretraining dataset size, we find that several modestly sized ...
| Authors | Wesley Scivetti, Ethan Wilcox, Nathan Schneider et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 29 May 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 29 May 2026 |
Silytics shows public metadata from arXiv and links to the original. Information may be incomplete or out of date. Last refreshed 17 October 2026. Licenses and terms of the original apply to the work itself. Not financial, legal or professional advice.