Deriving Level 1/Level 2 affix classes in English: Floating vowels, cyclic syntax
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This article accounts for the traditionally-labelled Level 1/Level 2 affix distinction in English by combining the predictions of floating segmental structure (e.g. Rubach 1996) and cyclic spell-out by phase (Chomsky 1999; Marantz 2007). It offers insight not only into the different phonological patterns these affixes trigger, but importantly, explains when the same affix will trigger distinct phonological patterns (when an affix behaves sometimes as Level 1 and sometimes as Level 2). It is argued that Level 1 affixes are distinguished by an initial floating vowel in their underlying representations, and that if we combine this with the proposal that affixes that merge directly to roots are interpreted in the same phonological cycle as these roots then we can remove the reference to diacritic notions such as Level 1 and Level 2 from the grammar. This then allows for a fully modular account of English affix classes, where the phonological derivation refers solely to phonological representations.
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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 | 0.062 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 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) | 0.001 | 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