Gradience, Determiners and Null Possessors: Revisiting French Inalienable Syntax
Bibliographic record
Abstract
While syntax is a crucial part of understanding inalienable possession, it must be seen as interacting with lexical semantics and pragmatics.A case in point is the French double dont construction (DOC), which differs from regular genitive relatives in having two NPs which are linked to the antecedent of the complementizer dont.Tellier (1991) claims that the second N P must be either deverbal or inalienable.This paper will examine 3 aspects of Tellier's work that call for further study.First is the argument/adjunct dichotomy which she proposes as a means of distinguishing relational from alienable nouns in the lexicon.It is argued here, on both empirical and theoretical grounds, that such a dichotomy presents too many problems to be adopted for the lexicon in a simple, binary fashion.Secondly, the special status of the definite determiner, which Tellier treats as a flag of inalienability for the 2nd possessum of DOCs, is questioned.The existence of other determiners in that position, as well as the possibility of a generic (i.e., non-possessive) reading for Ns occurring with Ie, suggest a less automatic link between inalienability and Ie.Finally, constraints on possessor construal are examined, an issue going beyond DOCs.Tellier, among others, contends that a relational noun can have a null possessor only in generic contexts, a claim that applies, as she admits, exclusively to isolated 5s, i.e., independently of any discourse or pragmatic context.We can avoid such an extreme requirement by viewing counter-examples to this constraint as pragmatically marked, invariably linked to special contexts such as a medical scenario.Such markedness alleviates the need for explicit local mention of a possessor.These three issues pose significant but not insurmountable obstacles for handling inalienable possession within a G-B framework. INTRODUCTION1This paper will deal with semantic and pragmatic aspects of French inalienable possession (IPOSS)that raise problems for a purely syntactic 1 This paper is a revision and extension of Kliffer (1994).For generous and patient access to their intuitions, both grammatical and stylistic, my thanks to
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".