A cognitive linguistics analysis of phrasal verbs representation in distributional semantics

Phrasal Verbs (PVs) constitute a peculiar feature of the English language and represent a challenge for both language learners and computational models because of their complex and idiomatic nature, which has made them appear unsystematic and unpredictable. Recently, Cognitive Linguistics has offered a more systematic explanation of the semantics of PVs by relating their non-compositional meanings to the metaphorical extensions of the particle’s meaning. In order to assess the computational suitability of this approach using Distributional Semantics, we analyzed three different semantic spaces to understand how PVs and particles are represented and whether any of the embeddings capture the significance of particles in the semantics of the entire construction. The results indicate that phrase embeddings are effective in representing the meanings of PV constructions, while word embeddings excel at capturing particle meanings and additionally support the Cognitive Linguistics hypothesis. Since improving the semantic representation of PVs can benefit various NLP applications, further research is necessary to validate these findings.