A Hierarchical and Attentional Analysis of Argument Structure Constructions in BERT Using Naturalistic Corpora

Abstract

This study investigates how the Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers model processes four fundamental Argument Structure Constructions. We employ a multi-dimensional analytical framework, which integrates MDS, t-SNE as dimensionality reduction, Generalized Discrimination Value (GDV) as cluster separation metrics, Fisher Discriminant Ratio (FDR) as linear diagnostic probing, and attention mechanism analysis. Our results reveal a hierarchical representational structure. Construction-specific information emerges in early layers, forms maximally separable clusters in middle layers, and is maintained through later processing stages.