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Record W2010806217 · doi:10.1177/0075424203257833

The Gerund and the to-Infinitive as Subject

2003· article· en· W2010806217 on OpenAlexaff
Patrick Duffley

Bibliographic record

VenueJournal of English Linguistics · 2003
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldArts and Humanities
TopicSyntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation
Canadian institutionsUniversité Laval
Fundersnot available
KeywordsInfinitiveLinguisticsGerundVerbPredicate (mathematical logic)PhilosophyCausativeMathematicsComputer science

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

This corpus-based study shows that the distinction between the gerund and the infinitive cannot be accounted for in terms of the previously proposed oppositions between particularity and generality or between reification and hypothesis/potentiality. The corpus used does reveal certain distributional tendencies that distinguish the two forms, but they are also found to occur as subjects of the very same predicates. The explanation proposed to account for both distribution and the capacity of both forms to be used with the same predicate is based on a definition of their basic meanings as the condition determining their use in discourse. The distinction in meaning between these two constructions is shown to be more complex than that of a simple binary opposition, as the to-infinitive is a composite made up of the meanings of its two component parts—the bare infinitive and the preposition to—while the - ingis part of the verb’s morphology.

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 imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.002
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.004
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.006
Threshold uncertainty score0.021

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0020.004
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0010.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0010.000
Bibliometrics0.0020.001
Science and technology studies0.0020.004
Scholarly communication0.0040.007
Open science0.0010.003
Research integrity0.0010.002
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0060.001

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 head0.019
GPT teacher head0.244
Teacher spread0.225 · 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

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designNot applicable
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

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".

Quick stats

Citations40
Published2003
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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