Agreeing against the odds: When clitic clusters trigger agreement
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This paper investigates split ergativity in Laki (Northwestern Iranian). Present-stem verbs follow the accusative alignment and past-stem verbs follow the ergative alignment. We argue that T and v are two loci of agreement in the ergative alignment. As a result of an Agree relation with v , the φ-features of the external argument are realized as a clitic. However, we argue that obtaining agreement with T depends on the argument type and its accessibility to T. Normally, the objects remain low inside the v P phase and are inaccessible to T (Chomsky’s 2001 Phase Impenetrability Condition). Meanwhile, when the in-situ realization of deficient pronouns violates a clitic cluster restriction, they raise to the edge of the phase. This movement leads to an Agree relation between T and the pronoun. We show that deficient pronouns remain low only when their in-situ realization does not violate the clitic cluster restriction. In this v P-internal position, a deficient pronoun is inaccessible for an Agree relation with T, leading to its realization as a pronominal clitic. We show that agreement in Ardalani Kurdish closely parallels the agreement in Laki, except that it lacks a clitic cluster restriction. Without this restriction, a deficient pronoun remains in situ, and crucially its low realization consistently correlates with the absence of agreement. In line with previous findings (Johns 2000; Deal 2016; Haig 2017; Carrier 2020; Yuan 2022), we conclude that ergativity is not a unitary phenomenon. Rather, it should be characterized as a system resulting from the interaction between various parameters.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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