The Ts’ë- Passive in Dëne Sułıne
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Transitivity changes have long been a focus of research in Dene (Athabaskan) languages. Although the basic agentless passive construction is well documented in Dëne Sųłıné (DS)— a northern Dene language spoken in Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Alberta, and the Northwest Territories— a second type of passive construction has been evidenced in the language data gathered through the Talking Dene (TD) study, conducted in the La Loche and Clearwater River Dene Nation (CRDN) communities between 2020 and 2025. This second passive construction differs from the more prevalent basic passive by its morphological inclusion of the impersonal subject prefix ts’ë-, hence it is termed the ts’ë- passive in this thesis. Uniquely, the ts’ë- passive denotes a detransitivized verb form which maintains overt reference to a generic actor, whose interpretation is inclusive of the first and second persons. Pragmatically, the ts’ë- passive allows the speaker to validate descriptions of habitual events or statements from a first-person orientation, and in some cases, to make neutral inquiries or suggestions to an addressee. For some verb themes, however, the ts’ë- passive instead appears to function as a surrogate form to either the basic passive construction or the impersonal active construction. Presently, the ts’ë- passive appears to be an innovative actor-defocusing construction used primarily by a subset of younger DS speakers; however, its current functional set may become more conventionalized in time. The emergence of the ts’ë- passive is particularly salient because of ongoing changes being made to the function of voice-valence markers in DS, which are responsible for morphologically displaying transitivity changes in a wide variety of constructions, including passives, causatives, reflexives, and reciprocals.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".