“He loved his father but next to adored his mother”: <i>Nigh</i> ( <i>ly</i> ), <i>Near</i> , and <i>Next</i> ( <i>To</i> ) as Downtoners
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.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In Present-Day English, nearly functions as an approximator downtoner meaning ‘almost, all but, virtually,’ as do earlier variants based on the same root— nigh, nighly, near, next ( to)—though more rarely and in more restricted contexts. Nigh functions as an approximator downtoner in Old and Middle English. When near displaces nigh, nigh is retained as a downtoner with lexical adjectives expressing negative semantic prosody. Near is used as a downtoner in later Middle and Early Modern English. However, degree adjunct uses are not well attested, thus pointing to incomplete grammaticalization. During the eighteenth century, the new -ly form ( nearly) takes over the innovative downtoner function and the old form ( near) is retained in the original locative sense, with some remnant downtoner uses. Next ( to) grammaticalizes as a downtoner, but proceeds only to the degree modifier stage and involves a high degree of idiomaticization, thus suggesting incipient grammaticalization. As spatial adverbs, nigh/ near/ next ( to)/ nearly represent one of the well-known sources for the grammaticalization of degree adverbs. However, these forms seem to follow a pathway where the degree modifier use (adjective/participle modifier) precedes the degree adjunct use (verb modifier), contrary to the reverse pathway postulated for other degree adverbs.
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 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 | 0.002 | 0.100 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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 it