Contrafactives, learnability, and production

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.3765/elm.3.5810

Keywords:

Contrafactives, Factives, Semantic universals, Learnability, Transformers

Abstract

No natural language has contrafactive attitude verbs. Because factives are universal across natural languages, this means that there is a major asymmetry between contrafactives and factives. We previously hypothesised that this asymmetry arises partly because the meaning of contrafactives is significantly harder to learn than that of factives. Here we test this hypothesis by using a production-oriented computational experiment that overcomes two limitations of our previous experiments. We find that our results do not support our previous hypothesis.

Author Biographies

  • David Strohmaier, University of Cambridge

    Department of Computer Science and Technology, ALTA Institute

  • Simon Wimmer, Heinrich-Heine-University Duesseldorf

    Assistant Professor ("wissenschaftlicher Beschäftigter"), Department of Philosophy

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Published

2025-01-24

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Section

Articles