Case-Dependent Agreement in an Active–Stative Language
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
This paper revisits the cross-reference marking system of Mbyá Guaraní, focusing on two phenomena: object agreement using the prefix i- and its allomorphs, and absolutive cross-reference marking in converbs. The analysis demonstrates that cross-reference marking in Mbyá is sensitive to abstract Case. Building on a view of agreement as an obligatory operation whose failure does not result in ungrammaticality, this paper argues that the segment i- is an object agreement prefix, rather than part of an allomorph of an active subject agreement prefix. This marker is underspecified for person, allowing it to cross-reference 1st, 2nd or 3rd objects. The paper further argues that converbs in Mbyá Guaraní follow an absolutive cross-reference marking pattern, where only intransitive subjects or objects are cross-referenced. This pattern is shown to be consistent with cross-linguistic and historical data from the Tupí–Guaraní family. This paper’s contributions include a proposal for case-sensitive agreement in Mbyá, with active agreement prefixes realizing agreement with nominative DPs only. The analysis also emphasizes the different roles of Infl and little v as probes for person features, with little v being underspecified and not triggering cyclic expansion. The proposed framework accounts for both hierarchical cross-reference marking in independent clauses and absolutive marking in converbs, unifying these two patterns under the assumption of Case dependence of agreement.
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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 | 0.000 |
| 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