The Semantics of KÊ·akÌÊ·ala Object Case
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this dissertation, I investigate factors underlying the distribution of object case in KÊ·akÌÊ·ala, an endangered Northern Wakashan language of British Columbia, Canada. KÊ·akÌÊ·ala has two types of objects, instrumental (=s) and accusative (=xÌ). To account for their distribution, I develop a semantic theory of object case that is grounded in event structure. The first central claim of this theory is that instrumental case marks internal arguments which participate in initiating subevents (Co-initiators), while accusative case marks internal arguments which participate in non-initiating subevents (Non-initiators). Concomitantly, any internal argument which participates in both the initiating and non-initiating subevents of an event can undergo instrumental/accusative case alternation. The second central claim of this theory is that instrumental case adds semantic value, while accusative case is a meaningless default. \tSupporting evidence for these claims comes from field data. On the one hand, object case realization is constrained by verb meaning, as shown by the existence of correlations between particular semantic verb classes and particular case frames. On the other hand, evidence that case realization is determined by event structure comes from data showing that modifying event structure affects case realization. Three types of event structure modification which license case alternation include the Direct Manipulation Alternation, the Caused Motion Alternation, and semantic incorporation with the affixal verb -(g)ila âmakeâ. The event-structural basis of object case is also revealed in the vicinity of weak verbs (Ritter & Rosen 1996) where the semantic value of object case is communicated independently of lexical entailments. \t\t\tThis analysis allows us to see how KÊ·akÌÊ·alaâs object case system manifests a wider cross-linguistic tendency for languages to grammaticalize a link between object-encoding and event structure. I illustrate this by showing that KÊ·akÌÊ·alaâs object case system is semantically the mirror image of the object case system in Finnish, in which the final bound of events is grammaticalized as an interpretable accusative case (Leino 1982, Heinämäki 1984, 1994, Kratzer 2004). Taking an even wider view, KÊ·akÌÊ·ala fits squarely within the event-structural typology proposed in Ritter & Rosen (2000), where languages are divided according to whether they grammaticalize the initial or final bound of events. KÊ·akÌÊ·alaâs object case system thereby fits into existing cross-linguistic patterns while also expanding our notions of what a possible case system looks like.
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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 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.003 |
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; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
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".