The structure and interpretation of (pro)nominal expressions in Spanish
Bibliographic record
Abstract
According to the DP hypothesis, the merger of a determiner and a noun yields a determiner phrase (DP) rather than a noun phrase (nP). Focusing on Spanish, I defend the DP hypothesis but reject the notion that argumenthood is contingent upon a DP layer. Instead, I maintain that arguments can be as small as nP provided that they are c-commanded by a verb or a preposition, in which case the variables that they introduce are bound through a last-resort operation of existential closure. I then consider the ways in which functional projections above nP shape the denotation of nominal arguments and adopt Borer’s (2005) view that a division phrase (DivP) is responsible for countability. Nonplural indefinite expressions can either have mass or singular readings depending on the determiner ("mucho tomate" 'much tomato' versus "un tomate" 'a tomato'), whereas nonplural definite expressions can have both mass and singular readings no matter the determiner ("el/este/mi tomate" 'the/this/my tomato'). I attribute the systematic ambiguity of nonplural definite expressions to the absence of DivP in their structure and the maximality operator that is a component of definiteness. Throughout the thesis, I explore the formal representation of φ-features and how their semantic behaviour is conditioned by their syntactic position. I propose that gender features have consequences for interpretation when they are hosted by Panagiotidis’s (2019) animacy phrase (AnimP) but not by nP and extend this argument to number features on DivP versus nP, thereby eliminating the need for "interpretable" and "uninterpretable" versions of the same feature. As for pronouns, it is not immediately apparent where they are generated in Spanish because they are not mutually exclusive with the definite article ("nosotros los cocineros" 'we the chefs'). After upholding Höhn’s (2016, 2017) claim that pronouns originate in a dedicated person phrase (πP) in languages that use the definite article in pronoun-noun constructions, I address the issue of the third-person gap ("*ellos los cocineros" 'they the chefs') and argue that third-person pronouns are forms that realize π, D, Div, Anim, and n, a configuration that prevents other material from occupying these same heads.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, 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".