# Contextual Embedding Evidence for Main--Light Verb Distinctions in Urdu

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.23645 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.23645/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 3 of its 14 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 Aug 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Towards a Cleaner Document-Oriented Multilingual Crawled Corpus](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.06642/) (2022)
- [Light or Full Verb? A Minimal-Pair Dataset for Probing Phraseological Competence in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.05087/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Urdu light verbs contribute schematic event-structural meaning while remaining lexically related to corresponding main verbs. This study tests representational predictions derived from Butt's analysis using contextual embeddings from UrduBERT, DunbaaBERT, and multilingual BERT across 1,126 naturally occurring sentences containing seven Urdu verbs. Main and light uses show significant representational separation in all 21 verb--model comparisons. At the same time, same-lemma main and light centroids are consistently closer than mismatched main--light lemma pairs, supporting continued lexical relatedness. In a seven-way prediction task restricted to light uses, verb identity remains recoverable after the target is masked, with UrduBERT achieving 0.866 accuracy and 0.852 macro-F1. UrduBERT also retains 0.782 accuracy under a preceding-form-disjoint evaluation, indicating generalization beyond repeated local verb combinations. These findings provide computational evidence consistent with Butt's account that Urdu light verbs differ systematically from their main uses while retaining lemma-specific and verb-specific representational structure.