‘Out of control’ marking as circumstantial modality in St’át’imcets
Why this work is in the frame
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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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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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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 it