The Holistic Storage of Verb+Up Phrases in Text-based and Audio-based Language Models

Frequent verbs such as 'have' and 'make' can function either as collocates in light-verb constructions or as full lexical predicates, as in 'make a decision' vs. 'make a cake'. Whether language models represent this distinction, and whether such representations vary across languages, remains unclear. We introduce a large-scale controlled dataset in English, Spanish, and French, comprising minimally varying sentence series in which the same context contains the same verb in light-verb and full-verb uses. Two probing experiments show that language models differentiate between these uses even in minimal contexts and exhibit separable patterns across object types. We release the dataset, generation code, and materials as a reusable resource. The framework supports extensions to broader contexts, additional verbs, and other languages.

Usage-based theories of grammars posit that creative productivity of the structures of language is both bolstered and constrained by two distinct frequency signals: entrenchment, stemming from high frequency usage, and preemption, stemming from having never observed a particular linguistic structure in a context where one might expect that structure to appear. Large Language Models are also usage-based, in the sense that the structures of language are learned through exposure to vast amounts of text. Here, we test whether or not the opposing statistical forces of entrenchment and preemption also encourage and constrain linguistic productivity in LLMs. We demonstrate across model architectures that larger models recognize and can reproduce with nonce words constructional productivity (entrenchment) in cases of coercion, wherein the broader constructional context coerces an atypical interpretation of a lexical item. However, we also show that even the largest models do not extend negative evidence to novel language, and statistical preemption does not enable models to avoid overgeneralization of patterns that are semantically felicitous, but never observed in data.

Grammaticality and likelihood are distinct notions in human language. Pretrained language models (LMs), which are probabilistic models of language fitted to maximize corpus likelihood, generate grammatically well-formed text and discriminate well between grammatical and ungrammatical sentences in tightly controlled minimal pairs. However, their string probabilities do not sharply discriminate between grammatical and ungrammatical sentences overall. But do LMs implicitly acquire a grammaticality distinction distinct from string probability? We explore this question through studying internal representations of LMs, by training a linear probe on a dataset of grammatical and (synthetic) ungrammatical sentences obtained by applying perturbations to a naturalistic text corpus. We find that this simple grammaticality probe generalizes to human-curated grammaticality judgment benchmarks and outperforms LM probability-based grammaticality judgments. When applied to semantic plausibility benchmarks, in which both members of a minimal pair are grammatical and differ in only plausibility, the probe however performs worse than string probability. The English-trained probe also exhibits nontrivial cross-lingual generalization, outperforming string probabilities on grammaticality benchmarks in numerous other languages. Additionally, probe scores correlate only weakly with string probabilities. These results collectively suggest that LMs acquire to some extent an implicit grammaticality distinction within their hidden layers.