How are polar interrogatives in Mauritian Creole formed?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Mauritian Creole is known to form polar questions in two ways: by using the utterance-initial particle eski, derived from French est-ce que 'is it the case that', or by applying a rising intonation to the declarative sentence. This paper asks the question whether both question forms are syntactically interrogative sentences or instead have different underlying structures. The question is relevant if we consider that a number of languages use declarative sentences to ask (biased) polar questions, a question type known as ''declarative questions'' in the literature (also: ''rising declaratives'' in English). We evaluate the possibility of intonation questions being the equivalents of declarative questions. Using a battery of tests originally designed for European French, we present native speaker judgments from the third author of the paper. While we found that not all our tests point to the conclusion that intonation questions are declarative sentences, the test results provide significantly more support to intonation questions being declarative questions rather than syntactic interrogatives.
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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 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".