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Record W2883529634 · doi:10.5070/bf211039923

The Semantics of Kwak'wala Object Case

2018· article· en· W2883529634 on OpenAlex

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.

aboutThe title or abstract carries a Canadian signal from the geographic lexicon.
no affNo Canadian affiliation: this work is invisible to an affiliation-only frame.
No Canadian affiliation. An affiliation-only frame, the usual design, would never have seen this work. It is one of the works that make the case for inverting the frame.

Bibliographic record

VenueBerkeley Papers in Formal Linguistics · 2018
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldArts and Humanities
TopicSyntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsVerbObject (grammar)LinguisticsEvent (particle physics)Realization (probability)Alternation (linguistics)Semantics (computer science)Computer scienceEvent structureMathematicsPhilosophyProgramming language

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

In this dissertation, I investigate factors underlying the distribution of object case in Kʷak̓ʷala, an endangered Northern Wakashan language of British Columbia, Canada. Kʷak̓ʷala has two types of objects, instrumental (=s) and accusative (=x̌). To account for their distribution, I develop a semantic theory of object case that is grounded in event structure. The first central claim of this theory is that instrumental case marks internal arguments which participate in initiating subevents (Co-initiators), while accusative case marks internal arguments which participate in non-initiating subevents (Non-initiators). Concomitantly, any internal argument which participates in both the initiating and non-initiating subevents of an event can undergo instrumental/accusative case alternation. The second central claim of this theory is that instrumental case adds semantic value, while accusative case is a meaningless default. Supporting evidence for these claims comes from field data. On the one hand, object case realization is constrained by verb meaning, as shown by the existence of correlations between particular semantic verb classes and particular case frames. On the other hand, evidence that case realization is determined by event structure comes from data showing that modifying event structure affects case realization. Three types of event structure modification which license case alternation include the Direct Manipulation Alternation, the Caused Motion Alternation, and semantic incorporation with the affixal verb -(g)ila ‘make’. The event-structural basis of object case is also revealed in the vicinity of weak verbs (Ritter & Rosen 1996) where the semantic value of object case is communicated independently of lexical entailments. This analysis allows us to see how Kʷak̓ʷala’s object case system manifests a wider cross-linguistic tendency for languages to grammaticalize a link between object-encoding and event structure. I illustrate this by showing that Kʷak̓ʷala’s object case system is semantically the mirror image of the object case system in Finnish, in which the final bound of events is grammaticalized as an interpretable accusative case (Leino 1982, Heinämäki 1984, 1994, Kratzer 2004). Taking an even wider view, Kʷak̓ʷala fits squarely within the event-structural typology proposed in Ritter & Rosen (2000), where languages are divided according to whether they grammaticalize the initial or final bound of events. Kʷak̓ʷala’s object case system thereby fits into existing cross-linguistic patterns, while also expanding our notions of what a possible case system looks like.

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 imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.008
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.889
Threshold uncertainty score0.903

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.008
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0010.001
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

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.

Opus teacher head0.020
GPT teacher head0.249
Teacher spread0.229 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it