Unergatives are different: Two types of transitivity in Samoan
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper provides arguments in favour of a non-unified treatment of transitive and unergative verbs, based upon the patterning of unergative constructions in the ergative-absolutive language Samoan. Building upon a proposal by Massam (2009; to appear), I argue that unergative subjects in Samoan are merged lower than transitive subjects, the result being a difference in case marking patterns associated with each verb type. In the spirit of much work which has advocated for a split vP structure (e.g., Pylkkännen 2008; Harley 2013; Legate 2014; a.o.), I propose that unergative subjects are merged in the specifier of vP, while transitive subjects are introduced in a higher projection (VoiceP). This proposal is motivated primarily from split case patterning: while Samoan unergative subjects appear with absolutive case, addition of an object to an unergative verb does not yield the typical ergative-absolutive pattern associated with canonical transitives. Instead, a non-ergative case pattern arises, in which the subject is absolutive, and the object is marked with the prenominal marker i. The Samoan unergative + object construction bears similarities with another set of two-place (so-called middle verbs) which exhibit the same abs-i case frame. Despite the absence of ergative case, both unergative + object and middle constructions are syntactically transitive with respect to various language-internal diagnostics. I argue that the case split results from differing case assigning properties of v and Voice: i is analysed as structural accusative case, assigned to the object by v0, while ergative subjects are assigned case by Voice0. The division of external arguments across two VP-external projections can be captured by expanding Dowty’s (1991) framework of thematic proto-roles, whereby unergative and middle “proto-low” (vP) agents encompass a subset of the semantic properties of full-fledged transitive “proto-high” (VoiceP) agents. The additional properties of proto-high agents correspond to additional phrasal structure.
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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 | 0.003 |
| 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