Early time reference in Inuktitut child language: The role of event realization and aspectual interpretation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In Inuktitut, a polysynthetic language spoken by the Inuit of arctic Quebec, a single temporally unmarked verb form is interpreted as either perfective or imperfective, depending on the telicity of the verb stem. The theoretical framework of Bohnemeyer and Swift (in press) explains this alignment pattern with the notion of event realization, that is, the entailment of occurrence of an event (at a certain time). This paper traces the role of event realization and aspectual interpretation in the development of time reference in children acquiring Inuktitut. These children exhibit three developmental phenomena that appear puzzling or contradictory in comparison with findings reported crosslinguistically. First, early on children acquiring Inuktitut demonstrate facility with the variation in time reference of the temporally unmarked verb forms, even in the absence of overt linguistic cues marking temporal differences. Second, they develop competence with future marking before past marking. Third, they first use marked past forms with atelic verbs. The analysis presented provides a uniform explanation for these three developmental puzzles.
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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 | 0.000 | 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 | 0.000 | 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) | 0.001 | 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".