Split Ergativity is not about Ergativity
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 This chapter argues that split ergativity is epiphenomenal, and that the factors which trigger its appearance are not limited to ergative systems in the first place. In both aspectual and person splits, the split is the result of a bifurcation of the clause into two distinct case/agreement domains, which renders the clause structurally intransitive. Since intransitive subjects do not appear with ergative marking, this straightforwardly accounts for the absence of ergative morphology. Crucially, such bifurcation is not specific to ergative languages; it is simply obfuscated in nominative-accusative environments because there, by definition, transitive and intransitive subjects pattern alike. The account also derives the universal directionality of splits, by linking the structure that is added to independent facts: the use of locative constructions in nonperfective aspects (Bybee et al. 1994, Laka 2006, Coon 2013), and the requirement that 1st/2nd person arguments be structurally licensed (Bejar & Rezac 2003, Preminger 2014).
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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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