What Travels Across Languages? Reading, Transfer and Erasure of Cross-Lingual Concept Subspaces in Bangla Idioms

arXiv:2611.11386v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Cross-lingual concept analysis requires distinguishing the information that a subspace retains from the classifiers and erasers that transfer through it. We study these operations in six frozen encoders using 10,359 Bangla (Bengali) idiom senses, eight input conditions, and figurative-class and sentiment labels. Class-mean directions provide the most consistent evidence of shared coarse meaning: in post hoc analyses, they outperform random-subspace, permuted-label and covariance-matched nulls in all 12 model-label tests under balanced accuracy. A prospective internal re-split supports idiom-alone sharing in 10 of 12 tests, spanning five encoders. The original confirmatory logistic-regression family rejects both planned nulls in 4 of 12 tests, where English directions gain only a few accuracy points above the majority-class floor (3.0-7.3). Classifier transfer depends on the input map and regularization: English-trained class-mean readouts beat both zero-shot nulls in 8 of 12 discovery tests, and stronger source-selected penalties improve transfer through logistic and LEACE directions. These readouts use Bangla-validation-selected layers and unlabeled target preprocessing. Input controls show greater coarse-class sharing for explicit glosses than for idiom counterparts. Reading, however, does not imply effective erasure: English-fitted LEACE removes less than one percentage point of Bangla figurative-class accuracy, compared with 4-11 points for Bangla-fitted LEACE; INLP shows a similar asymmetry. Pattern-filter analysis, covariance-weighted input maps and a binary Gaussian overlap bound explain how these operations can diverge. The analogous multiclass ordering is an empirical diagnostic, observed in 11 of 12 cells. The results support an estimator-sensitive account of cross-lingual concept sharing and motivate evaluating reading, classifier transfer, erasure and overlap separately.