Exploration of the Semantic Difference between the Two Negative Markers lw- and (-)si(-) in Swahili
Bibliographic record
Abstract
When dealing with negation, grammars of Standard Swahili generally present three basic negative markers, ha-, (-)si(-), and -to-.For two of these three markers, ha-and -si-, grammars describe their distribution, but explanations of their difference in meaning are either not provided or often unsatisfactory.The difference between ha-and -si-in form, position and function has led to the hypothesis, which will be explored in this paper, that both negative markers differ in meaning.The forms ha-and -si-are considered here with reference to the markers hu-, -me-, -na-, -ki-, -/i-, -ta-, -nge-, -ngali-, -ja-, and -ku-, which are trea ted here as markers of tense / aspect. 1 It will be argued that since ha-and -si-cannot co-occur, occur in different positions in the verbal construction, have (in part) different co-occurrence restrictions with respect to tense/aspect markers and finals, and may occur in different clause types, a difference in meaning can be established.It is proposed that both ha-and -si-negate events, but differ in that hanegates the time that is specified as necessary for the execution of the event by the tense/aspect marker, and -si-negates the assertion made by the verb. BACKGROUND The structure of simple verbal constructions in SwahiliThis section provides a brief background on verbal constructions in Swahili.Only those aspects that pertain to the following discussion are included.1 For an analysis of Swahili tense/aspect markers in a Guillaumian framework see Hewson & Nurse (1997).The meaning difference between the two negative markers has been established based on an analysis of tense and aspect markers in a Guillaumian framework.I would like to thank J. Hewson, B.
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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) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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".