Bibliographic record
Abstract
There is a long tradition in placing I above YOU in linguistics and grammar. In our Western grammatical terminology, I is the “first person”. In the universal scale of agentivity, or “universal person hierarchy”, I is placed before YOU. The goal of this paper is to examine the proof for ordering I and YOU in such a fashion. The universal character of local person marking in human languages, and existing proposals concerning the person hierarchy are reviewed. The kind of grammatical phenomena governed by the so-called “universal hierarchy”: split ergativity, inverse systems, and pronominal marking, are discussed. First, we show that there are languages whose grammatical phenomena are governed by the other order, with YOU above I. Looking for the possibility that two person hierarchies share room within world languages, we then turn to the facts that support placing I above YOU, and demonstrate that this proof is non-existent. The egocentric perspective belongs to linguistics, and to certain habits of a Western school of thought, not to natural languages. The data examined here also shows that there are no languages where split ergativity or the inverse system would operate from a hierarchy placing 3rd persons above 2nd or 1st , thus confirming a 2, 1>3 hierarchy. As far as a hierarchy between singular persons or Speech Acts participants is concerned, the one for which there is clear evidence is the one where YOU outranks I: 2>I.
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 | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.036 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.018 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.010 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".