Exploring the effect of semantic diversity on boundary permeability in verb/noun heterosemy using deep contextualized word embedding
-
Gui Wang
Abstract
This study investigates the relationship between semantic diversity and boundary permeability in verb/noun heterosemous words in English. Using sense data from the Oxford Dictionaries API and the Corpus of Historical American English enhanced by contextualized word embedding, we quantified semantic diversity using Shannon entropy and measured boundary permeability as the relative proportion of verb/noun uses. Results reveal a significant positive effect of overall semantic diversity on boundary permeability, i.e., words that have more senses or balanced sense distributions show greater cross-categorical flexibility. Furthermore, we find asymmetric effects between noun and verb semantic diversity: noun-sense diversity positively affects permeability, while no meaningful effect was detected for verb-sense diversity. This asymmetry, combined with our finding that higher permeability is driven by increased verb usage, provides strong quantitative evidence for a directional preference in English conversion from noun to verb. To our knowledge, this study offers the first large-scale empirical support for theoretical accounts of directionality in English conversion, demonstrating that semantic diversity functions as a critical indicator of a word’s conceptual flexibility.
Funding source: National Social Science Fund of China
Award Identifier / Grant number: No. 20AYY001
Acknowledgments
We would like to thank Xia Wu and Zenan Chen for their valuable suggestions on the draft. We also thank the area editor Prof. Vsevolod Kapatsinski for his insightful comments on the methodology, and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on this article. This work was supported by the National Social Science Fund of China (No. 20AYY001).
References
Allen, Benjamin, Mark Kon & Yaneer Bar-Yam. 2009. A new phylogenetic diversity measure generalizing the Shannon index and its application to phyllostomid bats. The American Naturalist 174(2). 236–243. https://doi.org/10.1086/600101.Search in Google Scholar
Balteiro, Isabel. 2007. The directionality of conversion in English. Berlin: Peter Lang.Search in Google Scholar
Bauer, Laurie. 1983. English word-formation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.10.1017/CBO9781139165846Search in Google Scholar
Berg, Thomas. 2014. Boundary permeability: A parameter for linguistic typology. Linguistic Typology 18(3). 489–531. https://doi.org/10.1515/lingty-2014-0020.Search in Google Scholar
Berg, Thomas. 2023. Comparing the functional range of English to be to German sein: A test of the boundary permeability hypothesis. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory 19(3). 371–396. https://doi.org/10.1515/cllt-2022-0015.Search in Google Scholar
Biese, Yrjö Moses. 1941. Origin and development of conversions in English. Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia.Search in Google Scholar
Bybee, Joan. 2010. Language, usage and cognition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.10.1017/CBO9780511750526Search in Google Scholar
Davies, Mark. 2012. Expanding horizons in historical linguistics with the 400-million word corpus of historical American English. Corpora 7(2). 121–157. https://doi.org/10.3366/cor.2012.0024.Search in Google Scholar
Devlin, Jacob, Ming-Wei Chang, Kenton Lee & Toutanova Kristina. 2019. BERT: Pre-training of deep bidirectional transformers for language understanding. In Jill Burstein, Christy Doran & Thamar Solorio (eds.), Proceedings of the 2019 conference of the North American chapter of the association for computational linguistics: Human language technologies, vol. 1: Long and short papers, 4171–4186. Minneapolis, MN: Association for Computational Linguistics.Search in Google Scholar
Dickman, Mike. 1968. Some indices of diversity. Ecology 49(6). 1191–1193. https://doi.org/10.2307/1934512.Search in Google Scholar
Divjak, Dagmar & Stefan Th. Gries. 2008. Clusters in the mind? Converging evidence from near synonymy in Russian. Mental Lexicon 3(2). 188–213. https://doi.org/10.1075/ml.3.2.03div.Search in Google Scholar
Enfield, N. J. 2006. Heterosemy and the grammar-lexicon trade-off. In Felix K. Ameka, Alan Dench & Nicholas Evans (eds.), Catching language: The standing challenge of grammar writing, 297–320. De Gruyter Mouton.10.1515/9783110197693.297Search in Google Scholar
Evans, Vyvyan & Melanie Green. 2006. Cognitive linguistics: An introduction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.Search in Google Scholar
Geeraerts, Dirk. 1989. Introduction: Prospects and problems of prototype theory. Linguistics 27(4). 587–612. https://doi.org/10.1515/ling.1989.27.4.587.Search in Google Scholar
Geeraerts, Dirk. 1997. Diachronic prototype semantics: A contribution to historical lexicology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.10.1093/oso/9780198236528.001.0001Search in Google Scholar
Gries, Stefan Th. 2007. Corpus-based methods and cognitive semantics: The many senses of to run. In Stefan Th. Gries & Anatol Stefanowitsch (eds.), Corpora in cognitive linguistics: Corpus-based approaches to syntax and lexis, 57–100. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.10.1515/9783110197709.57Search in Google Scholar
Hu, Renfen, Li Shen & Shichen Liang. 2019. Diachronic sense modeling with deep contextualized word embeddings: An ecological view. In Proceedings of the 57th annual meeting of the association for computational linguistics, 3899–3908. Florence: Association for Computational Linguistics.10.18653/v1/P19-1379Search in Google Scholar
Jarvis, Scott. 2013. Capturing the diversity in lexical diversity. Language Learning 63(s1). 87–106. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9922.2012.00739.x.Search in Google Scholar
Ježek, Elisabetta. 2016. The lexicon: An introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Search in Google Scholar
Lakoff, George & Mark Johnson. 1980. The metaphorical structure of the human conceptual system. Cognitive Science 4(2). 195–208. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15516709cog0402_4.Search in Google Scholar
Langacker, Ronald W. 1991. Foundations of cognitive grammar, vol. 2, descriptive application. Stanford: Stanford University Press.Search in Google Scholar
Marchand, Hans. 1969. The categories and types of present-day English word-formation: A synchronic-diachronic approach, 2nd edn. Munich: Beck.Search in Google Scholar
Plag, Ingo. 1999. Morphological productivity: Structural constraints in English derivation. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.Search in Google Scholar
Rosch, Eleanor. 1973. Natural categories. Cognitive Psychology 4(3). 328–350. https://doi.org/10.1016/0010-0285(73)90017-0.Search in Google Scholar
Rosch, Eleanor. 1978. Principles of categorization. In Cognition and categorization. London: Routledge.Search in Google Scholar
Shao, Bin, Jing Zheng & De Smet Hendrik. 2024. The blurring of the boundaries: Changes in verb/noun heterosemy in recent English. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory 20(2). 321–346. https://doi.org/10.1515/cllt-2022-0053.Search in Google Scholar
Shen, Jiaxuan. 2010. Starting from “an actor is a verb”: On the asymmetry between “nominal verbal usage” and “verbal nominal usage”. Contemporary Rhetoric 1. 1–12. https://doi.org/10.16027/j.cnki.cn31-2043/h.2010.01.001.Search in Google Scholar
Shi, Yaqian & Lei Lei. 2022. Lexical richness and text length: An entropy-based perspective. Journal of Quantitative Linguistics 29(1). 62–79. https://doi.org/10.1080/09296174.2020.1766346.Search in Google Scholar
Taylor, John R. 1995. Linguistic categorization. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Search in Google Scholar
Traugott, Elizabeth Closs & Richard B. Dasher. 2001. Regularity in semantic change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.10.1017/CBO9780511486500Search in Google Scholar
Zipf, G. K. 1949. Human behavior and the principle of least effort. Cambridge, MA: Addison-Wesley Press.Search in Google Scholar
© 2025 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Editorial
- Editorial 2025
- Research Articles
- Vowel formant track normalization using discrete cosine transform coefficients
- Asymmetry in French speech-in-noise perception: the effects of native dialect and cross-dialectal exposure
- Direct pseudo-partitives in US English
- A baseline for object clitic climbing in Italian
- Semantic granularity in derivation
- Shared processing strategies as a mechanism for contact-induced change in flexible constituent order
- The (non)canonical status of the ka- passive in Balinese
- A comparative study of 时 si 2 /shi 2 in Meixian Hakka and Ancient Chinese using the Minimalist Program
- A quantitative method for syntactic gradience: words, phrases, and the constructions in between
- Yeah, but how? Operationalizing the functions of the discourse-pragmatic marker yeah
- Hotspots for acoustic politeness in Korean and Japanese deferential speech
- How fast is fast and how slow is slow in mental simulation? Two rating studies on Estonian speed adverbs
- Discourse effects in processing Chinese reflexive pronouns
- Attitudinal negotiation: the analysis of online commentary videos about an international event on Chinese social media platform bilibili.com
- Crosslinguistic constructions and strategies: where do concessive conditionals fit in?
- Recurring patterns in tone (chain) shift
- Null pronoun interpretation probed via thematic role ambiguity: a case in Korean
- Experimental investigation on quantifier scope in Chinese relative clauses
- Sensitivity to honorific agreement: a window into predictive processing
- The negative concord illusion: an acceptability study with Czech neg-words
- Expletive negation in Italian temporal clauses: an acceptability judgement and a self-paced reading study
- Effects of information structure on pronoun resolution: the number of pronouns matters
- The cognitive processing of nouns and verbs in second language reading: an eye-tracking study
- Comprehension of conversational implicatures in L3 Mandarin
- Effects of crosslinguistic influence in definiteness acquisition: comparing HL-English and HL-Russian bilingual children acquiring Hebrew
- Multimodal language processing in school-aged Mandarin-speaking children: the role of beat gesture in enhancing memory for discourse information
- My Memoji, my self: prosodic correlates of online performed code-switching via avatar
- Gender effects in Mandarin creaky voice evaluation: a matched-guise study
- Narrating the doctoral journey on Chinese social media: chronotopes and scales in user interaction on Xiaohongshu
- Salient Language in Context (SLIC): a web app for collecting real-time attention data in response to audio samples
- Children’s emerging sociolinguistic expectations around social roles: a triangulated approach
- Situating speakers in change: a methodology for quantifying degree and direction of change over the lifespan
- Testing the effect of speech separation on vowel formant estimates
- Researching dialects with high school students: a citizen science approach
- Sociolinguistic research projects as brands
- Do readers perceive various types of knowledge expressed through evidentials in news reports with different degrees of certainty?
- Quantitative relationship between distribution of sentence length and dependency distance in Spanish
- Large corpora and large language models: a replicable method for automating grammatical annotation
- Using ATLAS.ti for constructing and analysing multimodal social media corpora
- Exploring the effect of semantic diversity on boundary permeability in verb/noun heterosemy using deep contextualized word embedding
- Communicative pressures influence the use of adverbs as well as adjectives: evidence from a crosslinguistic investigation
- Non-signers favor two-handed gestures when expressing inherently plural meanings
- Encoding Chinese metaphorical motion: a typological perspective
- Frequency does not predict the processing speed of multi-morpheme sequences in Japanese
- Did he lead monologues or did he talk to himself? How typological distance between source and target language influences the preservation of metaphorical mappings in translation
- How long is too long? Production-internal and communicative constraints in the coding of conditionality in Spanish
- Long English objects and short Chinese objects: language diversity shaped by cognitive universality
- Corrigendum
- Corrigendum to: Sign recognition: the effect of parameters and features in sign mispronunciations
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Editorial
- Editorial 2025
- Research Articles
- Vowel formant track normalization using discrete cosine transform coefficients
- Asymmetry in French speech-in-noise perception: the effects of native dialect and cross-dialectal exposure
- Direct pseudo-partitives in US English
- A baseline for object clitic climbing in Italian
- Semantic granularity in derivation
- Shared processing strategies as a mechanism for contact-induced change in flexible constituent order
- The (non)canonical status of the ka- passive in Balinese
- A comparative study of 时 si 2 /shi 2 in Meixian Hakka and Ancient Chinese using the Minimalist Program
- A quantitative method for syntactic gradience: words, phrases, and the constructions in between
- Yeah, but how? Operationalizing the functions of the discourse-pragmatic marker yeah
- Hotspots for acoustic politeness in Korean and Japanese deferential speech
- How fast is fast and how slow is slow in mental simulation? Two rating studies on Estonian speed adverbs
- Discourse effects in processing Chinese reflexive pronouns
- Attitudinal negotiation: the analysis of online commentary videos about an international event on Chinese social media platform bilibili.com
- Crosslinguistic constructions and strategies: where do concessive conditionals fit in?
- Recurring patterns in tone (chain) shift
- Null pronoun interpretation probed via thematic role ambiguity: a case in Korean
- Experimental investigation on quantifier scope in Chinese relative clauses
- Sensitivity to honorific agreement: a window into predictive processing
- The negative concord illusion: an acceptability study with Czech neg-words
- Expletive negation in Italian temporal clauses: an acceptability judgement and a self-paced reading study
- Effects of information structure on pronoun resolution: the number of pronouns matters
- The cognitive processing of nouns and verbs in second language reading: an eye-tracking study
- Comprehension of conversational implicatures in L3 Mandarin
- Effects of crosslinguistic influence in definiteness acquisition: comparing HL-English and HL-Russian bilingual children acquiring Hebrew
- Multimodal language processing in school-aged Mandarin-speaking children: the role of beat gesture in enhancing memory for discourse information
- My Memoji, my self: prosodic correlates of online performed code-switching via avatar
- Gender effects in Mandarin creaky voice evaluation: a matched-guise study
- Narrating the doctoral journey on Chinese social media: chronotopes and scales in user interaction on Xiaohongshu
- Salient Language in Context (SLIC): a web app for collecting real-time attention data in response to audio samples
- Children’s emerging sociolinguistic expectations around social roles: a triangulated approach
- Situating speakers in change: a methodology for quantifying degree and direction of change over the lifespan
- Testing the effect of speech separation on vowel formant estimates
- Researching dialects with high school students: a citizen science approach
- Sociolinguistic research projects as brands
- Do readers perceive various types of knowledge expressed through evidentials in news reports with different degrees of certainty?
- Quantitative relationship between distribution of sentence length and dependency distance in Spanish
- Large corpora and large language models: a replicable method for automating grammatical annotation
- Using ATLAS.ti for constructing and analysing multimodal social media corpora
- Exploring the effect of semantic diversity on boundary permeability in verb/noun heterosemy using deep contextualized word embedding
- Communicative pressures influence the use of adverbs as well as adjectives: evidence from a crosslinguistic investigation
- Non-signers favor two-handed gestures when expressing inherently plural meanings
- Encoding Chinese metaphorical motion: a typological perspective
- Frequency does not predict the processing speed of multi-morpheme sequences in Japanese
- Did he lead monologues or did he talk to himself? How typological distance between source and target language influences the preservation of metaphorical mappings in translation
- How long is too long? Production-internal and communicative constraints in the coding of conditionality in Spanish
- Long English objects and short Chinese objects: language diversity shaped by cognitive universality
- Corrigendum
- Corrigendum to: Sign recognition: the effect of parameters and features in sign mispronunciations
