On the historical source of <i>a ~ u</i> alternations in Dëne Sułıne optative paradigms
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In most dialects of Dëne Sųłıné, the optative prefix, reconstructed in Proto Dene as *Gʷə (Krauss 1969), exhibits an alternation in verb paradigms: an a-vowel is found in the 1st and 3rd person singular forms (ɣʷa, wa, or ha, depending on the dialect), while an u-vowel is found elsewhere (ɣʷu, wu, hu). This alternation raises three questions. First, how could the same consonant *Gʷ trigger both raising and lowering of the following vowel? Secondly, what phonological factors conditioned this alternation historically? And finally, does this alternation still belong to the synchronic phonology of modern Dëne Sųłıné dialects?In this paper, I will explore what insights the Contrastivist Hypothesis (CH) (Hall 2007, Dresher 2009) can add to our understanding of this alternation. Representationally, the CH makes it possible to describe lowering to a as spreading of [low], while raising to u involves spreading of [round]. I propose that the choice of which process applied in which forms depended on prosodic factors. In addition, I show what insights the CH can contribute to internal reconstruction. Specifically, I argue that, under the CH, spreading of [low] cannot be a part of the modern synchronic phonology of Dëne Sųłıné, but rather originated at a time before a series of consonant shifts occurred in the language, in particular when the retroflex series was still part of the consonant inventory.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| 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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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 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".