Genericity in third language English: Acquisition pattern and transfer in ultimate attainment
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study investigates the acquisition of genericity in advanced third language (L3) English. The learners are first language (L1) Moroccan Arabic–second language (L2) French adults. They completed an acceptability judgment task testing the interpretation of five count nominal types in noun phrase (NP)-level and sentence-level genericity: definite, indefinite and bare singulars, definite and bare plurals. The study defines the generic or non-generic status of every NP form in the learners’ L3 interlanguage. The results show that the L3 learners are target-like on the generic interpretation of bare plurals, although these are strictly existential in their native language and illicit in L2 French. Definite and bare singulars do not pose any difficulty either. In contrast, non-facilitative L1 transfer induces the generic interpretation of definite plurals and restricts indefinite singulars to the existential interpretation. The results show that the L3 learners do not distinguish NP-level from sentence-level genericity, reflecting L1 Arabic grammar where the two merge. They use the same pattern of NP types for the two types. Thus, knowledge of genericity in L3 English is a patchwork of target-like and non-target-like exponents.
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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 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 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