Not X, but When: Diagnosing a Mandarin LLM Writing Tic through Contextual Appropriateness
Recurring expressions in model-written text are often treated as signatures of machine authorship, yet most of them serve legitimate functions. Whether such an expression is a tic depends on whether the model knows when it is called for. This judgment of appropriateness, central to communicative competence, remains largely unexamined for language models. We study it through the Mandarin corrective construction bushi X, ershi Y ("not X, but Y"). Drawing on Gricean pragmatics and corrective negation, we introduce a decision tree that classifies uses as substantive, optional, or defective by testing whether the context makes X a live alternative and whether rejecting X is informative. Five c...
| Authors | Yihang Peng, Yi Jing, Dewen Liu et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 15 October 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 15 October 2026 |
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