A Computational Approach to Quantifying Grammaticization of English Deverbal Prepositions

Abstract

This paper explores grammaticization of deverbal prepositions by a computational approach based on corpus data. Deverbal prepositions are words or phrases that are derived from a verb and that behave as a preposition such as “regarding” and “according to”. Linguistic studies have revealed important aspects of grammaticization of deverbal prepositions. This paper augments them by methods for measuring the degree of grammaticization of deverbal prepositions based on non-contextualized or contextualized word vectors. Experiments show that the methods correlate well with human judgements (as high as 0.69 in Spearman’s rank correlation coefficient). Using the best-performing method, this paper further shows that the methods support previous findings in linguistics including (i) Deverbal prepositions are marginal in terms of prepositionality; and (ii) The process where verbs are grammaticized into prepositions is gradual. As a pilot study, it also conducts a diachronic analysis of grammaticization of deverbal preposition.