The form and function of interrogatives in Sm’algyax
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation examines the formation of questions in Sm’algyax (Maritime Tsimshianic;ISO: tsi; British Columbia, Alaska) based on new fieldwork.\nThe first part outlines the complex morphosyntactic reflexes of both local and\nlong-distance Ā-movement, including wh-movement, relativization, and focus. Although Sm’algyax\nexhibits a rigidly ergative pattern in terms of number and person agreement, it shows a unique\nthree-way distinction when extracting core arguments of a predicate. The extraction of an intran-\nsitive subject, a transitive subject, and a direct object are all marked differently. This reveals an\nunderlying structural distinction between intransitive subjects and transitive objects that is not\napparent when these elements remain in their in-situ positions.\nMoving beyond local movement, I show that long-distance movement is possible and exhibits\nthe same morphosyntactic marking found in local movement in each intermediate clause. This\nprovides clear evidence that cross-clausal movement does not occur in “one fell swoop”, but\nrather involves intermediate landing spots along the way (Chomsky, 1986, 2000; McCloskey, 2000;\nChomsky, 2001; Rackowski & Richards, 2005; Chomsky, 2008; van Urk & Richards, 2015).\nThe second part focuses on a unique set of markers in Sm’algyax—referred to as interrogative\nclitics—that appear in both wh-questions and polar questions. I show that they are sensitive to\na root/non-root clause distinction: they may appear in root/matrix questions, but not embedded\nquestions. Their appearance in matrix questions is sensitive to whether those questions are in\nsome sense canonical questions or not. I analyze the interrogative clitics as operators that appear\nin a high, peripheral syntactic position, and select for an interrogative clausal complement.\nFinally, I turn to the linear positioning of the interrogative clitics in the clause, and show\nthat they occupy a typologically rare second-last position. I show that appealing to the syntax,\nphonology, or a combination of syntax and phonology does not capture their distribution. Instead,\nI argue that the penultimate linearization implicates a distinct morphological component.
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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 | 0.000 |
| 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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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; 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".