Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract The purpose of this study is to assess from a corpus-based discourse-pragmatic perspective certain claims made in the literature concerning English wh - concessive conditional constructions (e.g. Whoever / No matter who comes to the party, it will be fun ), namely that these utterance-types correlate with interrogative semantics, scalarity and potential modality. By means of an extensive investigation of corpus data these claims are shown to be largely unsupported by attested usage. Based on Dancygier and Sweetser’s classification of conditional constructions, it is found that potential modality is paradigmatic only of content-level concessive conditionals, and not of the epistemic, speech-act or metalinguistic varieties. Contrary to claims in the literature, scalarity is demonstrated to not be typical of wh - concessive conditionals. The lack of scalarity in most wh - concessive conditionals is argued to cast into doubt the category label “concessive conditional” applied to these constructions in a substantial part of the literature and to favour an alternative designation such as “irrelevance conditional.” The empirical data further reveals that wh - concessive conditionals practically never involve pure ignorance, and this is argued to be problematic on the discourse-pragmatic level for the claim that they have interrogative semantics.
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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) | 0.031 | 0.002 |
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; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
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".