Bibliographic record
Abstract
Michif is an under-described contact language spoken by a few hundred Metis people, mostly in Manitoba and Saskatchewan. It has two principal source languages: Plains Cree and French and has generally been analyzed as having two co-phonologies: French phonology applying to the French-source lexical items and Cree phonology applying to the Cree-source lexical items (Rhodes 1986, Bakker 1997, Bakker Papen 1997, Papen 2003. This thesis serves a dual role in the study of Michif. First, it offers the first systematic description of phonological distribution and patterning including segmental inventories, stress assignment and syllabification, as well as a sketch of Michif morphology and morphological categories. Second, it argues that Michif need not be analyzed as stratifying its lexical components according to historical source. Lexicon stratification of this type, according to historical language source, has also been posited for languages such as Japanese (Ito Mester 1997, 2001, 2005) and English (Kiparsky 1982) to account for synchronic differences in patterning of different lexical items. However distributional differences in Michif are argued not to be sufficient for positing a stratified lexicon, and it is argued in this thesis that previously claimed synchronic patterning either relies on diachronic data as input to synchronic rules, or else the patterning itself is no longer productive in Michif, or different phonemicization accounts for patterning differences. Two case studies in Michif patterning, stress assignment and I-deletion, are shown to be predictable and systematic with no differences in patterning with regards to historical language source. Given these facts, I argue that lexicon stratification in Michif is unwarranted. Although historical source domains do not play a role in synchronic Michif, prosodic domains are shown to have different phonological inventories and to pattern differently with respect to phonological processes such as syllabification and stress assignment. Michif affixes and minor categories are shown pattern differently, but this is based on regular synchronic patterning of linguistic, rather than historical, criteria.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 0.006 |
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".