Let’s keep an eye on Russian: testing sensitivity to the change in the grammatical number in somatic idioms with ruBERT

In recent times, linguistic research and computational linguistics have considered the morpho-semantic properties of the grammatical number in nouns. In this context, our study aimed at using a language model to test number variation on selected Russian somatic idioms containing locally and generally marked nouns. Overall, the model’s sensitivity corroborated the relevance of number in idioms, especially in instances where the semantics of number is particularly significant.