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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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".