Psycholinguistic studies suggested that our mental perception of events depends not only on the lexical items used to describe them, but also on the syntactic structure of the event description. More specifically, it has been argued that light verb constructions affect the perception of duration in event construal, such that the same event in this type of constructions is perceived by humans as taking less time (to give a kiss takes a shorter time than to kiss). In our paper, we present two experiments with BERT using English stimuli from psycholinguistic studies to investigate the effects of the syntactic construction on event duration and event similarity. We show that i) the dimensions of BERT vectors encode a smaller value for duration for both punctive and durative events in count syntax, in line with human results; on the other hand, we also found that ii) BERT semantic similarity fails to capture the conceptual shift that durative events should undergo in count syntax.

The distinction between mass nouns and count nouns has a long history in formal semantics, and linguists have been trying to identify the semantic properties defining the two classes. However, they also recognized that both can undergo meaning shifts and be used in contexts of a different type, via nominal coercion. In this paper, we present an approach to measure the meaning shift in count-mass coercion in English that makes use of static and contextualized word embedding distance. Our results show that the coercion shifts are detected only by a small subset of the traditional word embedding models, and that the shifts detected by the contextualized embedding of BERT are more pronounced for mass nouns.