Demonstratives locate referents in common space and ground: A comparative syntactic approach
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Demonstratives can be used to locate a referent in space but they can also be used to refer to discourse referents located in the common ground. In English, proximal demonstratives are used for novel referents (indefinite specific this ) while distal that can be used to refer to familiar referents. The empirical goal of this paper is to explore whether a similar pattern is found in other languages. To this end, we explored the use of demonstratives in 22 languages and found that this correlation is robust: if demonstratives are used for both spatial and grounding purposes, it is always the proximal demonstrative that is used for novel discourse referents and the distal demonstrative that is used for familiar discourse referents. The cross-linguistic solidity of this ‘Spatial-Grounding Correlation’, invites the conclusion that it is grammatically conditioned. We develop an analysis according to which the grounding use of spatial demonstratives is syntactically derived, utilising the Nominal Interactional Structure, independently motivated in Ritter and Wiltschko (2018, 2019, 2024).
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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 | 0.001 |
| 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 it