Participle fronting and clause structure in Old and Middle French
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper is a study of over 1100 Old and Middle French sentences in which a participle has been fronted to the left of an auxiliary, in what appears at first sight to be a Stylistic Fronting construction. These sentences were extracted from the MCVF parsed corpus of Old and Middle French. The first part of the article examines the size of the fronted element. It is shown that the fronted element may contain a single head, or it may be a full VP or a partial VP. It is argued that (remnant) VP movement accounts for the set of examples. In the second part of the paper, it is shown that the fronted constituent does not target a single position. In some cases, it occupies an IP-scrambling position between the subject in its canonical position and the finite verb; in a smaller number of cases, it is scrambled to the left of the subject. The fronted constituent is also attested within the left periphery, generally in Spec,FinP, but when the participle is contrastive or otherwise focalized, it could be analyzed a occupying Spec,FocP. The French facts are discussed in a cross-linguistic perspective.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 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) | 0.001 | 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