Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper reports on regional variation in the phonetic realization of /æ/, or "short-a", the vowel of bat, bad, band and bag, in Canadian English (CE).Labov (1991) called /æ/ one of two "pivot points" that determine the larger patterns of vowel shifting that serve to differentiate regional varieties of North American English at the phonetic level.These are variables of phonemic contrast in the front and back corners of the lower vowel space: in the back, the potential contrast is between /a/ (l o t ) and /o/ (t h o u g h t ); in the front, it is between lax /æ/ (TRAP), the main development of Middle English short /a/, and what Labov labels /æh/, a tensed variant that occurs before voiceless fricatives, like its British "broad-a" counterpart (b a t h ), as well as before variable sets of voiced obstruents and nasals.CE has only one phoneme in each corner, so that t r a p and b a t h both have /æ/ and l o t and t h o u g h t both have /a/.The latter lack of contrast is referred to as the low-back merger, and has been suggested as the structural impetus for what Labov, Ash and Boberg (2006) found to be the main distinguishing phonetic characteristic of CE in comparison with adjacent American varieties, the Canadian Vowel Shift (Clarke, Elms and Youssef 1995).The Canadian Shift involves the lowering and retraction of the short front vowels /i, e, æ/ (k i t , d r e s s and t r a p ), led by the retraction of /æ/, first noted by Esling and Warkentyne (1993), into the low-central space made vacant by the low-back merger (American dialects without this merger tend to have /a/ in this position, blocking any retraction of /æ/).Labov et al. (2006) find that among the dialects with a single low-front phoneme there are three main allophonic systems.In the U.S. Inland North, the whole /æ/ class is tensed, rising to mid-front position.Much of the Midland and West exhibit a "nasal system", in which /æ/ is regularly tensed and raised before nasals (/æN/, e.g.band, ram), so that pre-nasal tokens form a distinct set from the rest of the distribution (e.g.bat, bad), which remains in low-front position.CE is characterized by a "continuous short-a system", in which allophones of /æ/ form a phonetic continuum along the low-front margin of the vowel space, from low-front bat to raised and fronted band.Crucial in this classification is the behavior of /æ/ before /g/ (bag).In "nasal" systems, /æg/ is lax, remaining with the rest of the /æ/ distribution; in Canada, by contrast, /æg/ shows an intermediate degree of tensing, distinct from both the more advanced tensing of /æN/ and the absence of tensing in bat or bad.Further research with a Canadian focus, reported here and in Boberg (2008Boberg ( , 2010)), finds that this is a simplification, obscuring important regional differences.While this "continuous" system does apply across the country, it is realized slightly differently in each region.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 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; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".