Contrafactives, learnability, and production
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.3765/elm.3.5810Keywords:
Contrafactives, Factives, Semantic universals, Learnability, TransformersAbstract
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.
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Copyright (c) 2025 David Strohmaier, Simon Wimmer

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Published by the LSA with permission of the author(s) under a CC BY 4.0 license.