A fresh look at root infinitives from a cross-linguistic perspective
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this paper we examine the relation between the quantity and quality of the adult input to the child and the intensity of the root-infinitive stage in child language. We compare the languages English, French, German, Italian and Brazilian Portuguese and test whether children produce infinitives more extensively if the verb morphology of their target-languages is ambiguous with respect to the distinction between finite and nonfinite verb forms, or whether the token-frequency of nonfinite verbs in the Input is crucial. We conclude by proposing that the latter is not decisive. Rather, children seem to avoid the use of finite verb forms especially in languages whose verb paradigms are characterized by ambiguities. Root infinitives may thus be viewed as a temporary phenomenon in a phase during which children are learning the inflectional properties of their target language.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 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) | 0.021 | 0.004 |
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 it