Cross-linguistic variation in the expression of ignorance
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article examines the properties of epistemic indefinites (EIs) when pluralized, focusing on the following puzzle: while ignorance is expressed by both singular and plural EIs in a number of languages, e.g. German, only the singular conveys ignorance in languages such as Spanish and French. What is the nature of this parameter? We propose that, despite appearances and, in contrast with the German situation, algunos and French quelques are not lexically related to singular epistemic algún and quelque, respectively. We show that, in these languages, singular EIs give rise to a conventional implicature -- in the sense of Potts (2005)--, rather than a conversational implicature based on Gricean reasoning, as in Alonso-Ovalle & Menéndez-Benito (2011) for Spanish: the ignorance expressed in Spanish and French is inherent to singular EIs. Using evidence from the inclusive/exclusive distinction (Krifka 1989; Sauerland 2003; Farkas & de Swart 2010; Martí 2020), we provide support for the idea that, despite plural morphology, the role of algunos EIs and quelques EIs is to express paucity (adding evidence for Martí (2015) proposal for Spanish).
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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 | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| 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 | 0.001 | 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".