Apparent expletive negation, silent comparatives, and domain widening in Quebec French superlative and universal constructions
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In Quebec French, embedded clauses introduced by a universal quantifier or by a superlative may contain a negative morpheme pas that has been analyzed as a type of expletive negation, although it does not have the distribution of the known cases of expletive negation. It is argued that, in the constructions containing that apparently expletive negation, pas is not a new type of expletive, but it is a standard negation operating in syntax and negating a silent comparative. The analysis accounts for the domain widening effect of the apparently expletive pas, and it has the welcome advantage of limiting the proliferation of theoretical constructs. In this analysis, an item that gives every sign of being expletive upon a superficial examination turns out to be not expletive at all once silent categories are taken into account.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
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 | 0.000 | 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) | 0.000 | 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
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".