Modal Determiners and Alternatives: Quantity and Ignorance Effects
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
The literature on epistemic indefinites has explored the possibility that different pragmatic competitors give rise to different epistemic effects (Alonso-Ovalle & Menéndez-Benito (2010), Fa ̆la ̆us ̧ (2009)). Like epistemic indefinites, ‘class B modified numerals’ (Nouwen (2010)), such as English at least n, signal speaker ignorance. This paper examines the modal component of the Spanish complex determiner algún que otro, which, like at least n, conveys that the speaker does not know how many individuals satisfy the existential claim. We show that the modal component of at least n and algún que otro differ. Unlike at least n, algún que otro does not determine the minimum number of individuals that, according to the speaker, might satisfy the existential claim. We argue that the epistemic component of algún que otro is an implicature, and, building on the discussion in Nouwen (forthcoming), we contend that the contrast between at least n and algún que otro can also be traced back to the different pragmatic competitors that these items invoke.
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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 | 0.004 |
| 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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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