Variation as a testing ground for grammatical theory
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper addresses the contribution that corpus-based studies of syntactic variation can make to the construction, elaboration and testing of formal syntactic theories, with a particular focus on the testing dimension. In particular, I present a new empirical study of obligatory and optional asymmetric negative concord phenomena, and I show how an influential analysis for obligatory concord patterns (de Swart, 2010) can be tested using variation data through looking at the predictions that its natural probabilistic extension makes for the forms, interpretations and frequency distributions of expressions in languages in which asymmetric concord is optional. In obligatory negative concord languages like Spanish, negative indefinites, such as nadie ‘no one’, appear bare in preverbal position (i.e. in an expression like Nadie ha venido ‘No one came’), but they co-occur with the negative marker no in postverbal negative concord structures such as No he visto a nadie ‘I did not see anyone.’ (lit. ‘I did not see no one.’). Furthermore, in this language, co-occurrence between a negative marker and an n-word is either prohibited ( * Nadie no ha venido ), or it is obligatory ( *He visto a nadie). Québec French shows a variable version of the Spanish pattern in which the negation marker optionally co-occurs with postverbal negative indefinites ( J’ai ( pas ) vu personne ‘I saw no one’) but is prohibited with preverbal negative indefinites * Personne est pas venu (Ok: Personne est venu. ‘No one came’). I show how the predictions for Montréal French of de Swart’s analysis of Spanish can be tested (and, in this case, mostly verified) using a quantitative study of the distribution of bare and concord structures in the Montréal 84 corpus of spoken Montréal French (Thibault & Vincent, 1990) through looking at its natural extension within Boersma (1998)’s stochastic generalization of the Optimality Theory framework, which is the framework in which de Swart’s proposal is set.
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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 | 0.002 |
| 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) | 0.003 | 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