Iconicity of grammatical tonal polarity and reduplication in Nigerian Pidgin
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This work focuses on a pattern of tonal alternation that is intertwined with a pattern of reduplication in Nigerian Pidgin. In the language, verbs are reduplicated to iconically express iteration. To convey that the iterated event occurs in an irregular or dispersive manner, the verb bears a low tone (L) on all its tone-bearing units (TBU), while the reduplicant bears a high tone (H) on all its TBUs. The resulting L-H tonal melody is considered the exponent of an irregular marker, while the intertwined reduplication is considered the exponent of an iteration marker. Due to the similarity between the exponent of the irregular marker and the iconic tonal melody of ideophones that express the semantic notions of irregularity across languages, the form-meaning mapping of the irregular marker is regarded as a grammaticalised form of the tone melody in the substrate ideophones. This suggests that ideophones can contribute to the emergence and expansion of grammar, as well as the typology of grammatical tone. Considering that perceptual resemblance between linguistic structures and the structural components of real-world elements is the basis of iconicity, the pattern of tonal alternation in Nigerian Pidgin suggests that the notion of perceptual motivation in linguistic theory is not purely phonetic and phonological but also includes the crossmodal perception of sensory imagery.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| 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".