MétaCan
Menu
Back to cohort
Record W2890233356 · doi:10.5070/bf211038968

Spell-out, Chains, and Long Distance Wh-movement in Seereer

2018· article· en· W2890233356 on OpenAlex
Nicholas Baier

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.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.

Bibliographic record

VenueBerkeley Papers in Formal Linguistics · 2018
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldArts and Humanities
TopicSyntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation
Canadian institutionsMcGill University
Fundersnot available
KeywordsLinguisticsPronounComputer scienceVerbSentencePhilosophy

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

In this paper, I examine novel data from long distance wh-dependencies in Seereer, an Atlantic language of Senegal. Seereer long distance wh-questions are characterized by (a) the presence of an obligatory pronoun at the edge of each embedded clause and (b) the presence of special morphology on each verb along the path of the extraction. Thus, Seereer provides striking evidence that long distance wh-movement proceeds successive cyclically through the edge of each clause. I argue that this verbal morphology spells out a valued wh-probe on C, which triggers the movement of a wh-phrase to its Spec. I show that the pronouns present at the edge of each embedded clause have the properties of copies and not of resumptive pronouns, and argue that they are in fact spelled out intermediate copies of the moved wh-phrase. I propose that such multiple copy spell out is possible precisely because they enter into a feature valuation relationship with C. Specifically, I propose that valuation of an wh-probe defines a copy as the head of an A’-chain. Thus, the application of successive cyclic movement does not result in one long chain, but instead in a series of smaller chains. This view of the structure of long A’-chains, when combined with the independently motivated principle of spelling out the heads of chains, results in the pattern of multiple copy spell out that occurs in Seereer.

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)0.002
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesMeta-epidemiology (narrow)
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 score0.816
Threshold uncertainty score1.000

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.002
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
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 head0.018
GPT teacher head0.238
Teacher spread0.219 · 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