What type is it? Exploring the polysemy of tipo with contextualized embeddings

Abstract

Across languages, nouns of scientific classification (e.g., type, species, kind) tend to acquire new meanings over time (Brems & Davidse 2010; Mihatsch et al. 2023; Kolyaseva & Kisiel 2023). This paper analyzes the polysemy of tipo ‘type’ in Spanish, which can have the original taxonomic meaning and new meanings like ad hoc categorization and “general extender.” The boundaries between meanings remain hard to determine, and this challenge is not unique to Spanish. In this paper, we adopt a computational approach using a pretrained transformer. This paper asks: (i) Can contextualized embeddings capture the polysemy of tipo (de), and (ii) How do resulting sense clusters compare to meaning categories proposed in prior research? Our results show that computational methods shed light on the polysemy of tipo and provide ways to empirically test existing accounts of polysemy.