The Piaroa subject marking system and its diachrony
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 Piaroa, a member of the Sáliban language family, is spoken on both sides of the Colombian-Venezuelan border. Based on unpublished fieldwork data for Mako and Piaroa and published Piaroa and Sáliba data, this article focuses on the Piaroa subject marking system and its origins. I show that the subject prefixes and inner suffixes used in future tense were inherited from Proto-Sáliban and must therefore have preceded the rise of the right-margin subject markers ‑ sæ, -hæ and ‑ Ø . Based on comparative Mako data, I propose that these markers are old copular suffixes that entered the verbal domain through a nominal predication construction whose use expanded to encode habitual aspect. This research not only constitutes an important contribution to the description of Piaroa but also expands, within a Diachronic Construction Grammar approach, our understanding of complex systems of person marking, the origins of multiple exponence, and the role of multiple source constructions in paradigm creation.
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 | 0.006 |
| 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 | 0.000 | 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