Projecting Possibilities in the Nominal Domain: Spanish Uno Cualquiera
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Recent research argues that modal verbs project their domain of quantification from a part of the evaluation world—their ‘modal anchor’ (Hacquard 2006, 2009; Arregui 2009; Kratzer 2009, 2013, 2015). Based on the behaviour of the Spanish modal indefinite uno cualquiera, we contend that modal nominals can do the same. Uno cualquiera contributes modality: Juan cogió una carta cualquiera (‘Juan picked a random card’) conveys that Juan picked a card and that he chose it indiscriminately—he could have picked any other card. This ‘random choice’ interpretation is ruled out with non-volitional predicates (Choi & Romero 2008) and when uno cualquiera is in the subject position of agentive verbs. When uno cualquiera is embedded under some modals, another possibility arises: uno cualquiera introduces a distribution effect with respect to the worlds that the modal ranges over. For instance, ¡Coge una carta cualquiera! (‘Take any card!’) can be interpreted as conveying that any card is a permitted option. However, this harmonic interpretation is not available with all kinds of modals. We claim that this pattern can be derived if uno cualquiera is a nominal quantifier with a modal component that is anchored to an event. On this proposal, different interpretations arise depending on what event uno cualquiera takes as anchor. We argue that random choice modality is linked to the decision taken by the agent of the event described by the sentence. When the anchor of uno cualquiera is the event argument of the verb, uno cualquiera can access the decision that triggered this event, yielding the random choice interpretation. The selectional constraints that uno cualquiera imposes on its anchor restrict the types of modals that allow for harmonic interpretations.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.001 |
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".