Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This article develops a constructionalist approach to “lexical” causatives, as inThe sun melted the snow. It is argued that causation is a truly configurational meaning, arising as the interpretation of the syntactic combination of two verbal heads, the higher v representing the causing event (an unspecified dynamic vdo) and the lower v representing the resulting state named by the verbal root (a stative vbe). This structure contrasts with that of simple transitive activity verbs, which are monoeventive (vdo). A parallel contrast is established between bieventive inchoatives (vgo–vbe), as inThe snow melted, and simple unaccusatives, as inThe guests arrived(vgo). In this analysis, causatives and inchoatives both comprise two events and have an intersective nonderivational relationship. They share the lower resulting state; the type of the higher event distinguishes between the two. The analysis—developed with attention to Spanish data—can straightforwardly account for observed gaps in the causative alternation, the distribution of bare nouns, and scope ambiguity of adverbials and negation, and it sheds new light on the presence of reflexive morphology in inchoatives. The analysis implies that transitivity, as well as unaccusativity, can arise from two basic syntactic structures, on which distinctive verbal meanings are built. In this theory, no syntactic terminal or lexical verb expresses a relation between events; relations between events—such as causation, change of state, and resultatives—arise via semantic composition rules that interpret complex syntactic structures.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.011 | 0.002 |
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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".