‘Out of control’ marking as circumstantial modality in St’át’imcets
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper provides a unified semantic analysis of the so-called ‘out-of-control’ circumfix ka-…-a in St’át’imcets (Lillooet Salish). ka-…-a expresses an initially puzzling range of meanings, including “be able to”, “manage to”, “suddenly”, “accidentally”, and “non-controllable”. We propose that ka-…-a encodes circumstantial modality; we show that its various meanings all reduce to either an existential (ability) or universal (involuntary action) interpretation. Our analysis provides further support for a striking difference between St’át’imcets and English. In English, modals lexically encode quantificational strength, but do not encode distinctions between epistemic, deontic and circumstantial interpretations. St’át’imcets modals display exactly the inverse pattern (Rullmann et al. 2008). In line with this, ka-…-a lexically encodes circumstantial modality, but does not encode quantificational strength. The parallel between ka-…-a and other St’át’imcets modal elements provides support for our analysis, in contrast to previous accounts (e.g., Demirdache 1997), which treat ka-…-a as primarily aspectual in nature.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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 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".