Gender mismatches in partitive constructions in French
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper examines the syntax of partitive constructions with superlatives in French and the realization of gender in constructions with an animate noun, and focuses on contexts that allow gender mismatches (la plus intelligente de mes gentils professeurs ‘the most intelligent of my kind professors’). We show that such mismatches are allowed in French superlative partitives that contain a default masculine noun. To account for the mismatches, we propose that the nouns involved have an unvalued gender feature that can be assigned a sex specification in the course of the derivation. For superlative partitives we propose that this specification takes place in a Gender Phrase in the outer DP. Furthermore, we show that quantified partitives (e.g. three of the books) behave differently from superlative partitives, a fact we try to explain in terms of structural differences. We distinguish between partitives with an of-complement and non-canonical partitives with an ‘among’-PP or a preposed ‘of’-phrase. We also claim that our data can provide further insight into the role of locality in semantic agreement: we compare superlative partitives to quantified partitives in terms of agreement, and suggest that the two types of partitives should be placed in different positions on an Agreement Hierarchy.
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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) | 0.004 | 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