The Social stratification of the voiced interdental /ð/ in the battery dialect
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The social structure of a community has a significant influence on one's social network and identity. For instance, cohorts with multiple similarities in their social structure, especially those in low-status communities that are socially isolated, tend to have similar dialectal features (e.g., Chambers, 2003; Lippi-Green, 1989; Milroy, 1982). This study investigates the social and linguistic factors that contribute to the stratification of the voiced interdental /ð/ (a marker in Labovian terms) in the Battery, a small community outside of 81. John's, Newfoundland. Once a small fishing community known to be socially marginalized and segregated, the Battery is today a highly sought after area characterized by rampant development and expensive real estate, while still retaining some of its fishing village charm. This study adopts a variationist methodology for data collection and analysis, employing standard sociolinguistic interview protocols across a stylistic hierarchy to investigate the variable production of /ð/ and its less prestigious variant [d]. Results of the multivariate analysis (via Goldvarb X) demonstrate that there is possibly an intergenerational dialect shift with an increase in the use of the more prestigious variant [ð] from the older to the younger Battery natives. In addition, the results indicate a social stratification of /ð/ between members of the younger generation: Those still residing in the Battery pattern similarly to the older Battery natives in their use of the low-status identity marker [d], whereas those living outside of the community use the form significantly less. The results also reveal that there is significant variation in the use of /ð/ based on gender and style. The linguistic constraints that affect the variable production of /ð/ include word class and manner of articulation.
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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 | 0.005 | 0.040 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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".