Obligatorily null pronouns in the instructional register and beyond
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 English is not canonically considered a pro-drop language. Despite this, it does allow null pronouns, although less freely than traditional pro-drop languages like Italian and Japanese. The focus of this paper is the instructional register (characteristic of recipes) where we claim that object pronouns are obligatorily null in English: “Take 3 eggs. Break _ into a bowl.”. We present an analysis of Instructional Register Null Objects that also accounts for obligatorily null pronouns in certain radical pro-drop languages like Niuean. In this language, most pronouns are optionally null, however 3rd person inanimate pronouns are obligatorily null. We argue that the obligatorily null nature of such pronouns (whether register-specific like in English, or general as in Niuean) is a result of their lack of φ-features, which leaves them with only the option of being realized through Neeleman & Szendrői’s (2007) general Zero Spell-out Rule.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 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