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Record W1978783558 · doi:10.1017/s0954394509990172

The emergence of a new phoneme: Foreign (a) in Canadian English

2009· article· en· W1978783558 on OpenAlexaffabout
Charles Boberg

Bibliographic record

VenueLanguage Variation and Change · 2009
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicLinguistic Variation and Morphology
Canadian institutionsMcGill University
Fundersnot available
KeywordsLinguisticsAmerican EnglishVowelVariation (astronomy)North American EnglishHistoryVowel lengthPhonologyPsychologyPhilosophy

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Abstract The nativization or phonological adaptation of words transferred from other languages can have structural-phonological consequences for the recipient language. In English, nativization of words in which the stressed vowel is spelled with the letter , here called “foreign (a)” words, leads to variable outcomes, because English represents not one but three phonemes. The most common outcomes historically have been /ey/ (as inpotato), /æ/ (tobacco), and /ah/ (spa), but vowel choice shows diachronic, social, and regional variation, including systematic differences between major national dialects. British English uses /ah/ for long vowels and /æ/ elsewhere, American English prefers /ah/ everywhere, whereas Canadian English traditionally prefers /æ/. The Canadian pattern is now changing, with younger speakers adopting American /ah/-variants. This article presents new data on foreign (a) in Canadian English, confirming the use of /ah/ among younger speakers, but finds that some outcomes cannot be classified as either /æ/ or /ah/. A third, phonetically intermediate outcome is often observed. Acoustic analysis confirms the extraphonemic status of these outcomes, which may constitute a new low-central vowel phoneme in Canadian English.

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 machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.002
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Qualitative · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.040
Threshold uncertainty score0.087

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.002
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0020.002
Science and technology studies0.0040.002
Scholarly communication0.0010.000
Open science0.0010.001
Research integrity0.0000.001
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0030.000

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.

Opus teacher head0.026
GPT teacher head0.302
Teacher spread0.276 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designQualitative
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

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".

Quick stats

Citations43
Published2009
Admission routes2
Has abstractyes

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