Syntactic Representations Contain Semantic Information: Evidence From Balinese Passives
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Semantics-based approaches to syntax hold that the basic units of language are constructions: form-meaning pairings that have meanings in and of themselves. The aim of the present study was to test this claim using a previously-unstudied construction: Balinese passives. Using a grammatical acceptability judgment methodology with 60 native adult speakers, we found that independent ratings of 49 verbs’ semantic affectedness (obtained from a separate group of 20 native adult speakers) significantly predict the relative acceptability of these verbs in three types of passives (-a, ka- and ma- passives), and also actives, but not in what we term the “basic passive”; a construction which lacks the morphological markers that characterize the other passive types. These findings constitute support for semantics-based approaches to syntax, but are more difficult to reconcile with approaches that posit a pure-syntax level of representation that includes syntactic category information but not semantic information or lexical content.
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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 | 0.000 | 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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.021 | 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