Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis focuses on providing an account of the variation in agreement in English existential constructions of the form There-BE-plural NP. Copular agreement in these constructions can be either singular or plural. Unlike most English sentences, which show verbal agreement with the syntactic subject (the element in Spec, TP), standard agreement in these constructions is assumed to show number agreement with the plural, post-copular NP. Though many English speakers prefer the plural agreement, the full and abbreviated singular is attested and must be accounted for. This thesis aims to provide a syntactic and semantic account of the agreement patterns within these constructions. Semantic conclusions are drawn from a semantic judgment survey which investigated the effect of agreement type on NP interpretation. The syntactic account mainly draws on the notion that number agreement is the result of an NP moving before the verb at some point in the derivation (Kayne 2011), and the parallels between English existentials and Icelandic constructions involving long-distance agreement (Kučerová 2016).
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.
How this classification was reachedexpand
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) | 0.000 | 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) | 0.179 | 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, 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".