The Slovenian future auxiliary biti as a tenseless gradable evidential modal
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Adopting a general perspective inspired by formal semantics -most prominently Kratzer’s ideas on modals-, this paper argues that the Slovenian future auxiliary biti may function as an epistemic modal with evidential characteristics. In its epistemic capacity, biti is a Zero-tense/tenseless modal anchored to Speech Time. In other words, it signals a deduction/concession made at Speech Time, or displays a so-called present ‘Temporal Perspective’. Biti does not define the time or ‘Temporal Orientation’ of the depicted event, which is defined by Viewpoint Aspect. Biti may depict present, past, future, or habitual events when it combines with Imperfective (IMPF) Viewpoint Aspect. When combined with Perfective (PERF) Viewpoint Aspect, biti necessarily depicts future events/ acquires a future ‘Temporal Orientation’. Biti is a gradable modal connected to either a scale of believability or a scale of desirability, both anchored in the speaker.
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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) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.002 |
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