Does empirical data from bilingual and native Spanish corpora meet linguistic theory? The role of discourse context in variation of subject expression
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
Abstract The goal of this study is to shed light on how empirical data on the discourse constraints of null and overt third person subject pronouns in L1 and bilingual Spanish meet linguistic theory. A (semi)spontaneous production task was administered to 34 Moroccan Arabic (MA)/Spanish early sequential bilinguals and 30 L1 Spanish controls. All 3 rd person subject positions were coded: (1) morphosyntactic form (null pronoun vs. overt pronoun); (2) discourse function ([-Topic Shift] vs. [+Topic Shift]); (3) sentence relation (intrasentential vs. intersentential); (4) clause order within intrasentential contexts (main-subordinate vs. subordinate-main); and (5) access to the antecedent (clear vs. ambiguous antecedent). The results reveal general patterns of use in both L1 and bilingual Spanish: null pronouns express topic maintenance both in inter- and intrasentential contexts (both clause orders) and overt pronouns, especially in intersentential contexts, are generally used for topic change. However, additional analyses provide evidence that null pronouns in L1, but not in bilingual Spanish, are often used in change of reference contexts where the antecedent is not ambiguous. This reveals patterns that have gone unreported by most previous descriptive and theoretical studies. Finally, a higher use of ambiguous null pronouns is attested among bilingual speakers, which suggests a lower control of the mechanisms by which reference is established in discourse and supports, to some extent, the predictions derived from the Interface Hypothesis.
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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 | 0.036 |
| 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 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| 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