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Record W4312438004 · doi:10.54395/jot-yt9kd

Translating ἐὰν μή ‘unless’ Conditionals

2022· article· en· W4312438004 on OpenAlexaff
Steve Nicolle

Bibliographic record

VenueJournal of Translation · 2022
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldArts and Humanities
TopicSyntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation
Canadian institutionsCanadian Linguistic Association
Fundersnot available
KeywordsRhetorical questionLinguisticsDependent clauseComputer scienceOrder (exchange)PhilosophySentenceEconomics

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

The Greek conditional construction ἐὰν μή is usually translated into English using unless, which is a portmanteau combining the ideas of a conditional if and a negative not. Sentences containing ἐὰν μή ‘unless’ can often be challenging to translate for a combination of reasons: 1) in the majority of cases, the usual order of protasis (conditional clause) and apodosis (consequence clause) is reversed; 2) typically, both clauses are negative (or the protasis is negative and the apodosis is a rhetorical question expecting a negative response); 3) at the pragmatic level, the protasis usually describes the only situation or fact that would invalidate the apodosis. In this paper I will show that in many cases conditional sentences with ἐὰν μή ‘unless’ can be rephrased by removing the negative elements in both clauses and making explicit the pragmatic idea of exclusivity. However, this type of rephrasing is not always appropriate, and I discuss a number of situations in which it should potentially be avoided.

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.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.003
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.008
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.014
Threshold uncertainty score0.047

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0030.008
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0010.001
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0010.001
Science and technology studies0.0010.004
Scholarly communication0.0030.004
Open science0.0010.003
Research integrity0.0010.002
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0140.004

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.

Opus teacher head0.060
GPT teacher head0.268
Teacher spread0.207 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designNot applicable
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations5
Published2022
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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