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Record W1586945524

Bare Nouns, Incorporation, and Scope

2009· article· en· W1586945524 on OpenAlex

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.
fundA Canadian funder is recorded on the work.

Bibliographic record

VenueScholarship@Western (Western University) · 2009
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldArts and Humanities
TopicSyntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation
Canadian institutionsWestern University
FundersSocial Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada
KeywordsScope (computer science)TypologyNounLinguisticsComputer scienceHistoryPhilosophyArchaeology
DOInot available

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Barenouns,incorporation,andscope Thegoalofthispaperistoexploretheconnectionsbetweenthesyntaxandthesemantics ofbarenouns.Chierchia(1998)connectsthedistributionofbarenounscross-linguistically tovariationinnominalinterpretation:inalanguagelikeChinese,wherebarenounsarethe norm, the basic denotation of a noun is mass.In French and English, on the other hand, thereisamass/countdistinctionandthedistributionofbarenounsisrestricted.Rullmann and You (2006), however, argue that bare nouns in Chinese are not mass, per se, but unmarked for number ("general number").Moreover, they show that bare nouns take obligatory narrow scope, like English bare plurals -they conclude that there is a correlationbetweenthesyntaxofbarenounsandtheirsemantics,butthatthecorrelation relatessyntacticstructuretoscope.Theirconclusionisbackedupbydatafromarangeof languageswherebarenounstakenarrowscope,includingTurkish(Bliss2003),Indonesian (Chung2000),andJavanese(Sato2008).DatafromMalagasy,however,showthatneither Chierchia nor Rullmann and You is correct: Malagasy allows bare noun arguments that have general number, but these bare nouns permit variable scope readings (and the languagehasamass/countdistinction).Thusthemappingfromsyntaxtosemanticsisnot asstraightforwardaspreviouslyassumed.Malagasy has a definite determiner (ny in (1b) and other examples), but lacks an indefinite counterpart.Malagasy therefore allows bare (indefinite) noun arguments (1) much like Chinese, but it does not have a generalized classifier system (there is a mass/countdistinction)(2).LikeChinese,Malagasynounshavegeneralnumber:theyare morphologicallyunmarkedforsingularandplural,discourseanaphoracanbesingularor plural,andtheyshowthepragmaticeffectsofgeneralnumberdiscussedbyRullmannand You(3).Mostimportantlyforthispaper,however,barenounsallowbothwideandnarrow scope readings (4).Thus there is no strict correlation between the internal syntax of nominals (presence vs. absence of a determiner) and their semantics (scope), contra RullmannandYou.ThevariablescopebehaviourofbarenounsinMalagasyisallthemorepuzzlingwhen the external syntax of bare nouns is considered.Bare nouns in Malagasy appear to be pseudo-incorporated (Massam 2001): they must be adjacent to the verb and cannot undergoanymovement,suchasscrambling(5)ortopicalization.Inotherwords,Malagasy has syntactic pseudo-incorporation without so-called semantic incorporation (van Geenhoven1999,FarkasanddeSwart2003).Onceagain,weseethatthesyntaxdoesnot mapdirectlyontothesemantics.This paper concludes by exploring the possibility that Malagasy has a null indefinite determiner(theequivalentof'a'or'some'),thusthatbarenounsaren'treallybareatall.A nulldeterminerwouldmakethemappingbetweensyntaxandsemanticsmoreuniform:for Chierchia, Malagasy would then be a language like Italian; for Rullmann and You, the presence of the null determiner explains the scope facts.The null determiner could also explainthesomewhatrestricteddistributionofbarenounsinMalagasy,inparticulartheir inability to appear in the subject position (if the null head requires special licensing).On the other hand, positing a null determiner raises questions about learnability and the motivationfornullheadsinthesyntax.

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Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesMeta-epidemiology (narrow)
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Observational · Consensus signal: Observational
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.108
Threshold uncertainty score1.000

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0010.000
Scholarly communication0.0010.001
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

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.

Opus teacher head0.083
GPT teacher head0.281
Teacher spread0.198 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it