Study on the Quantificational Interpretation of Donkey Phrase in English: Utilizing Next Sentence Prediction with BERT

doi:10.18627/jslg.40.1.202405.21

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2024 Vol.40, Issue 1 Preview Page Next Page

Research Article

Study on the Quantificational Interpretation of Donkey Phrase in English: Utilizing Next Sentence Prediction with BERT: Kang, Arum¹, Lee, Yong-hun^1*; ¹Chungnam National University

31 May 2024. pp. 21-38

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Abstract

The aim of this study is to explore the interpretation patterns of four different types of quantificational meaning (universal/existential/deictic/generic) of the donkey phrase in English. Specifically, we utilized two deep learning language models: ChatGPT and BERT. To analyze a dataset of 240 sentences, with 60 sentences generated by ChatGPT. We employ Next Sentence Prediction (NSP) for the analysis. Based on surprisal values, our statistical examination revealed a hierarchy of low surprisal values signifying high acceptability in quantificational interpretations: existential > universal > deictic > generic. Our findings also showed that stand-alone sentences favored pronoun usage in the donkey phrase, while in NSP, definite NP demonstrated a higher acceptability. This implies that, even in theoretical analysis, the E-type theory employing quantifier expressions may present a more suitable framework for donkey phrases compared to the discourse representation theory utilizing bound variable pronouns.

Keywords

donkey sentence

quantificational interpretation

ChatGPT

BERT

Next Sentence Prediction

References

Abbott, B. 2002. Donkey demonstratives. Natural Language Semantics 10.4, 285-298. 10.1023/A:1022141232323
Chierchia, G. 1998. Reference to kinds across language. Natural language semantics 6.4, 339-405. 10.1023/A:1008324218506
Cooper, R. 1979. The interpretation of pronouns. Syntax and Semantics 10, 61-92. 10.1163/9789004373082_004
Davies, M. 1981. Meaning, quantification, necessity. London, Boston and Henley: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Devlin, J., Chang, M.-W., Lee, K., and Toutanova, K. 2018. BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding. arXiv preprint arXiv:1810.04805.
Elbourne, P. 2005. Situations and individuals. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Evans, G. 1977. Pronouns, Quantifiers, and Relative Clauses. Canadian Journal of Philosophy 7, 467-536. 10.1080/00455091.1977.10717030
Evans, G. 1980. Pronouns. Linguistic Inquiry 11, 337-362.
Geach, P. 1962. Reference and generality. Cornell: Cornell University Press.
Gil, D. 1996. Maltese “Collective Nouns”: A Typological Perspective. Rivista di Linguistica 8, 53-87.
Gilardi, F., Alizadeh, M., and Kubli, M. 2023. Chatgpt outperforms crowd-workers for text-annotation tasks, arXiv:2303. 15056. 10.1073/pnas.2305016120 37463210 PMC10372638
Heim, I. 1982. The Semantics of Definite and Indefinite Noun Phrases. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
Heim, I. 1990. E-type Pronouns and Donkey Anaphora. Linguistics and Philosophy 13, 137-178. 10.1007/BF00630732
Kamp, H. 1981. A theory of truth and semantic representation. In J.A.G. Groenendijk, T.M.V. Janssen, and M.B.J. Stokhof (eds.), Formal methods in the Study of Language, Mathematical Centre Tracts 135. Amsterdam: Mathematisch Centrum, 277-322.
Kanazawa, M. 1994. Weak vs. strong readings of donkey sentences and monotonicity inference in a dynamic setting. Linguistics and Philosophy 17, 109-158. 10.1007/BF00984775
Krifka, M. 1996. Pragmatic strengthening in plural predications and donkey sentence. Proceedings of Semantics and Linguistic Theory (SALT) 6, 136-153. 10.3765/salt.v6i0.2769
Lappin, S. 1989. Donkey pronouns unbound. Theoretical Linguistics 15, 263-289. 10.1515/thli.1988.15.3.263
Lappin, S. and Francez, N. 1994. E-type pronouns, I-sums, and donkey anaphora. Linguistics and Philosophy 17, 391-428. 10.1007/BF00985574
Neale, S. 1990. Descriptions. Cambridge, Massachusetts, London, England: The MIT.
Radford, A., Narasimhan, K., Salimans, T., and Sutskever, I. 2018. Improving Language Understanding by Generative Pre-Training. OpenAI Blog.
Russell, B. 1905. On denoting. Mind 14.56, 479-493. 10.1093/mind/XIV.4.479
Schubert, L. K. and Pelletier, F. J. 1989. Generically speaking, or, using discourse representation theory to interpret generics. Properties, types and meaning 2, 193-268. 10.1007/978-94-009-2723-0_6
Vaswani, A., Shazeer, N., Parmar, N., Uszkoreit, J., Jones, L., Gomez, A., Kaiser, L., and Polosukhin, I. 2017. Attention Is All You Need. arXiv preprint arXiv:1706.03762.
Warstadt, A., Singh, A., and Bowman, R. 2018. Neural network acceptability judgments. arXiv preprint arXiv:1805.12471. 10.1162/tacl_a_00290
Yoon, Y. 1994. Weak and strong interpretations of quantifiers and definite NPs in English and Korean. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Texas Austin.
Yoon, Y. 1996. Total and partial predicates and the weak and strong interpretations. Natural Language Semantics 4.3, 217-236. 10.1007/BF00372820

Information

Publisher :The Modern Linguistic Society of Korea
Publisher(Ko) :한국현대언어학회
Journal Title :The Journal of Studies in Language
Journal Title(Ko) :언어연구
Volume : 40
No :1
Pages :21-38
DOI :https://doi.org/10.18627/jslg.40.1.202405.21

[1] Abbott, B. 2002. Donkey demonstratives. Natural Language Semantics 10.4, 285-298. 10.1023/A:1022141232323

[2] Chierchia, G. 1998. Reference to kinds across language. Natural language semantics 6.4, 339-405. 10.1023/A:1008324218506

[3] Cooper, R. 1979. The interpretation of pronouns. Syntax and Semantics 10, 61-92. 10.1163/9789004373082_004

[4] Davies, M. 1981. Meaning, quantification, necessity. London, Boston and Henley: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

[5] Devlin, J., Chang, M.-W., Lee, K., and Toutanova, K. 2018. BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding. arXiv preprint arXiv:1810.04805.

[6] Elbourne, P. 2005. Situations and individuals. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

[7] Evans, G. 1977. Pronouns, Quantifiers, and Relative Clauses. Canadian Journal of Philosophy 7, 467-536. 10.1080/00455091.1977.10717030

[8] Evans, G. 1980. Pronouns. Linguistic Inquiry 11, 337-362.

[9] Geach, P. 1962. Reference and generality. Cornell: Cornell University Press.

[10] Gil, D. 1996. Maltese “Collective Nouns”: A Typological Perspective. Rivista di Linguistica 8, 53-87.

[11] Gilardi, F., Alizadeh, M., and Kubli, M. 2023. Chatgpt outperforms crowd-workers for text-annotation tasks, arXiv:2303. 15056. 10.1073/pnas.2305016120 37463210 PMC10372638

[12] Heim, I. 1982. The Semantics of Definite and Indefinite Noun Phrases. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

[13] Heim, I. 1990. E-type Pronouns and Donkey Anaphora. Linguistics and Philosophy 13, 137-178. 10.1007/BF00630732

[14] Kamp, H. 1981. A theory of truth and semantic representation. In J.A.G. Groenendijk, T.M.V. Janssen, and M.B.J. Stokhof (eds.), Formal methods in the Study of Language, Mathematical Centre Tracts 135. Amsterdam: Mathematisch Centrum, 277-322.

[15] Kanazawa, M. 1994. Weak vs. strong readings of donkey sentences and monotonicity inference in a dynamic setting. Linguistics and Philosophy 17, 109-158. 10.1007/BF00984775

[16] Krifka, M. 1996. Pragmatic strengthening in plural predications and donkey sentence. Proceedings of Semantics and Linguistic Theory (SALT) 6, 136-153. 10.3765/salt.v6i0.2769

[17] Lappin, S. 1989. Donkey pronouns unbound. Theoretical Linguistics 15, 263-289. 10.1515/thli.1988.15.3.263

[18] Lappin, S. and Francez, N. 1994. E-type pronouns, I-sums, and donkey anaphora. Linguistics and Philosophy 17, 391-428. 10.1007/BF00985574

[19] Neale, S. 1990. Descriptions. Cambridge, Massachusetts, London, England: The MIT.

[20] Radford, A., Narasimhan, K., Salimans, T., and Sutskever, I. 2018. Improving Language Understanding by Generative Pre-Training. OpenAI Blog.

[21] Russell, B. 1905. On denoting. Mind 14.56, 479-493. 10.1093/mind/XIV.4.479

[22] Schubert, L. K. and Pelletier, F. J. 1989. Generically speaking, or, using discourse representation theory to interpret generics. Properties, types and meaning 2, 193-268. 10.1007/978-94-009-2723-0_6

[23] Vaswani, A., Shazeer, N., Parmar, N., Uszkoreit, J., Jones, L., Gomez, A., Kaiser, L., and Polosukhin, I. 2017. Attention Is All You Need. arXiv preprint arXiv:1706.03762.

[24] Warstadt, A., Singh, A., and Bowman, R. 2018. Neural network acceptability judgments. arXiv preprint arXiv:1805.12471. 10.1162/tacl_a_00290

[25] Yoon, Y. 1994. Weak and strong interpretations of quantifiers and definite NPs in English and Korean. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Texas Austin.

[26] Yoon, Y. 1996. Total and partial predicates and the weak and strong interpretations. Natural Language Semantics 4.3, 217-236. 10.1007/BF00372820

The Journal of Studies in Language ISSN:1225-4770(Print) 2671-6151(Online) 언어연구

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