Language Has Two Parameters: Narrative-Induced Semantic Plasticity and Phase-Sensitive Interpretation
2026-08-18 • Computation and Language
Computation and Language
AI summaryⓘ
The authors argue that language meaning is governed by two main aspects: amplitude, which measures how strongly words are related, and phase, which influences how meanings interact and combine. Unlike current language models that only capture amplitude, phase can change the effect of a meaning while it remains present, helping explain things like irony or allusion. They propose that phase depends on individual experiences and interactions, which typical models averaging over many users miss. Their work suggests that language models should include this phase parameter to better represent how meaning works in real communication.
amplitudephaseword embeddingsattention weightstransformer modelsmonosemanticityquantum probabilitysemantic statesallusionirony
Authors
Hollis Robbins
Abstract
Language has two parameters. Count how often words occur together and you estimate amplitude, the strength of association. Word embeddings and attention weights refine that count, which sums every writer in the corpus together. This paper claims a second parameter, phase, which signed weights learned from a corpus do not supply. Phase exists only between meanings: it determines how coactivated meanings combine, and it can reverse what a meaning contributes while that meaning stays fully present. A speaker can set phase in the signal through linguistic form; encounters install phase relations and history distributes them. Population averaging deletes history-indexed phase: agent-deindexed corpora identify the population marginal state and determine no individual or dyadic state, at any scale. The standard transformer has no explicit representation for phase in frozen inference, and the interpretability program measuring progress by monosemanticity is optimizing against it: the coexistence it treats as a defect is the condition of allusion, irony, and quotation. Six predictions test whether a suppressed meaning stays active, whether encounter order changes what a phrase does, whether marking the signal changes how a shared phrase is taken, and whether a model given a history is changed by it or only informed about it. The claim defended is the weak version: interpretation requires a second relational parameter, signed, persistent, and indexed to individuals and dyads. Quantum probability is one notation for the parameter; nothing in the formalism claims quantum processes in the brain. The strong version, that the quantum calculus constrains these phenomena as signed classical models do not, rests on an encounter-order constraint not yet derived. The architecture the theory calls for is a language model with agent-indexed, phase-bearing semantic states.