Clausal embedding in Washo: Complementation vs. modification
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
Abstract This paper concerns clausal embedding in Washo (also spelled Washoe, Wáˑšiw), a highly endangered Hokan/isolate language spoken around Lake Tahoe in the United States. We argue that Washo offers evidence that both complementation and modification are available strategies for subordination, and in doing so contribute more generally to the ongoing debate about how clauses are embedded by attitude verbs. We observe that the embedding strategies of certain predicates in Washo follow from independent properties of clause types in the language. On the one hand, clauses embedded by presuppositional verbs come in the form of clausal nominalizations, which are selected as thematic internal arguments. The DP layer in these complements is responsible for encoding familiarity in a general sense (along the lines of Kastner 2015) both in these complement clauses as well as in other constructions in the language. On the other hand, clauses embedded by non-presuppositional verbs are not selected at all; they are instead adjunct modifiers, which follows from the fact that the attitude verbs they modify are always intransitive. This aspect of the analysis lends support to the property-analysis of ‘that’-clauses (e.g., Kratzer 2006; Moulton 2009; Elliott 2016), but only in certain instances of embedding. We argue that the Washo facts show that selection still plays a role for some verbs, contra theories that do away with it altogether (Elliott 2016), but selection cannot explain everything either, as non-presuppositional verbs are intransitive and do not select at all.
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 | 0.001 | 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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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