Proponents of the Distributed Morphology framework have posited the existence of two levels of morphological word formation: a lower one, leading to loose input-output semantic relationships; and an upper one, leading to tight input-output semantic relationships. In this work, we propose to test the validity of this assumption in the context of Hebrew word embeddings. If the two-level hypothesis is borne out, we expect state-of-the-art Hebrew word embeddings to encode (1) a noun, (2) a denominal derived from it (via an upper-level operation), and (3) a verb related to the noun (via a lower-level operation on the noun's root), in such a way that the denominal (2) should be closer in the embedding space to the noun (1) than the related verb (3) is to the same noun (1). We report that this hypothesis is verified by four embedding models of Hebrew: fastText, GloVe, Word2Vec and AlephBERT. This suggests that word embedding models are able to capture complex and fine-grained semantic properties that are morphologically motivated.

Szabó (2010, 2011) argues that DPs in intensional contexts have specific-opaque readings, in which their determiner scopes above some intensional operator while their restrictor is nevertheless interpreted in the scope of the operator. This poses a potential problem to prominent theories of intensionality (e.g. Percus 2000, Keshet 2008) in which wide quantificational scope (specificity) implies transparency. We attempt to restrict the scope of the problem by demonstrating that an important sub-class of Szabó's examples is syntactically restricted to relativization environments, and can be generated by invoking independently motivated mechanisms for NP reconstruction into relative clauses without calling into question commonly made assumptions about intensional constructions.