Variable pronunciation sites and types of wh-in-situ
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Examining data from Coptic Egyptian, the last descendant of the Ancient Egyptian language, this chapter argues for a new type of wh -in-situ, in which the copy privileged for phonological realization is the lowest member of the wh -chain, while the head of the chain as well as the intermediate copies are left unpronounced. Coptic can be described as a wh -in-situ language in which wh -clefting and wh -fronting are available as marked wh -interrogative strategies. The wh -insitu pattern is marked morphologically by “relative tenses”, so called because a relative marker appears in front of the tense-aspect-mood inflection. Based on their parallelism in scope and interpretation, the chapter argues that wh -in-situ and wh -fronting structures in Coptic are both derived by applications of wh -movement in the narrow syntax, before Spell-Out. Under this perspective, Coptic relative tenses are interpreted as a morphological instantiation of “ wh -agreement”. It is proposed that the simultaneous pronunciation of the topmost wh -copy and the relative marker are prohibited by an economy filter on the morpho-syntactic encoding of wh -dependencies, which is reminiscent of the “Doubly-filled Comp” Filter in English. Deletion of the wh -element or the relative marker is then what yields the apparent distinction between wh -movement and wh-in situ constructions at the surface. Lower copy pronunciation of wh -elements is of particular theoretical interest, since it shows that the PF wing of the grammar permits the same range of realization sites for wh -chains at LF (Bošković and Nunes, this volume).
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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 | 0.004 |
| 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) | 0.000 | 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