Pronominal object markers in Romance and Bantu
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Romance pronominal clitics and Bantu object markers vary in gender and number, replace arguments, and surface to the left of the verbal root in declarative clauses. Both types of morphemes are regularly analyzed as affixes on the verb. It is argued that both have syntactic properties that justify treating them differently from lexical affixes. The argument is first made for French unstressed pronominal objects like me, le, en, drawing from their distribution in contemporary French as well as from their historical behavior. It is shown that they are syntactic objects, and that their morphophonological affix-like properties should be treated independently of their syntactic behavior. Then evidence is presented pointing to the fact that Bantu object markers are also syntactic objects of some sort. The last section asks whether one can arrive at a unified treatment of both elements. The conclusion is that by focusing on the morphophonological properties of these pronominal elements, one runs the risk of overlooking their syntactic properties.
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.
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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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 | 0.000 |
| 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