From Parallels to Divergence: Language Models' Learning of Action Nominal Constructions
Action nominal constructions (ANCs) express events in nominal form, with their argument marking following patterns found in clauses or ordinary noun phrases. In this paper, we investigate how different grammatical configurations affect language models' learning of ANCs and related constructions, and how these learning preferences compare with typological distributions in natural languages. We use a grammar-engineered method for synthetic corpus construction that combines shared semantic input from natural corpora with computational grammars. We construct 96 target languages varying in clause word order, noun-phrase word order, alignment, complement system, and ANC strategy. For each langu...
| Authors | Iskar Deng, Shane Steinert-Threlkeld |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 15 October 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 15 October 2026 |
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