The paper reports on a corpus study of German light verb constructions (LVCs). LVCs come in families which exemplify systematic interpretation patterns. The paper's aim is to account for the properties determining these patterns on the basis of a corpus study on German LVCs of the type stehen unter' NP' (stand under NP').
Sentence embeddings encode information relating to the usage of idioms in a sentence. This paper reports a set of experiments that combine a probing methodology with input masking to analyse where in a sentence this idiomatic information is taken fro
m, and what form it takes. Our results indicate that BERT's idiomatic key is primarily found within an idiomatic expression, but also draws on information from the surrounding context. Also, BERT can distinguish between the disruption in a sentence caused by words missing and the incongruity caused by idiomatic usage.
