@inproceedings{yerastov-2025-modeling,
    title = "Modeling Constructional Prototypes with Sentence-{BERT}",
    author = "Yerastov, Yuri V.",
    editor = "Bonial, Claire  and
      Torgbi, Melissa  and
      Weissweiler, Leonie  and
      Blodgett, Austin  and
      Beuls, Katrien  and
      Van Eecke, Paul  and
      Tayyar Madabushi, Harish",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Construction Grammars and NLP",
    month = sep,
    year = "2025",
    address = {D{\"u}sseldorf, Germany},
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/iwcs-25-ingestion/2025.cxgsnlp-1.3/",
    pages = "24--33",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-318-0",
    abstract = "This paper applies Sentence-Bert embeddings to the analysis of three competing constructions in Canadian English: \textit{be} perfect, predicate adjective and \textit{have} perfect. Samples are drawn from a Canadian news media database. Constructional exemplars are vectorized and mean-pooled to create constructional centroids, from which top-ranked exemplars and cross-construction similarities are calculated. Clause type distribution and definiteness marking are also examined. The embeddings-based analysis is cross-validated by a traditional quantitative study, and both lines of inquiry converge on the following tendencies: (1) prevalence of embedded {--} and particularly adverbial {--} clauses in the \textit{be} perfect and predicate adjective constructions, (2) prevalence of matrix clauses in the \textit{have} perfect, (3) prevalence of definiteness marking in the direct object of the \textit{be} perfect, and (4) greater statistical similarities between \textit{be} perfects and predicate adjectives. These findings support the argument that \textit{be} perfects function as topic-marking constructions within a usage-based framework."
}