A framework for studying languages in contact: a prolegomenon to a theory
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Both lay people and linguists use the concept of ‘languages in contact’ in a broad range of different, albeit related, ways. When William, Duke of Normandy, invades England in 1066, he and his followers come speaking Norman French with a profound impact on English. But when 8-year old Christopher moves from Canada to England, his ‘accent’ changes in response to what he now hears around him. In between these two extremes are situations that can all be called language contact. To make sense of the spectrum of language contact, we outline some major dimensions of that concept, and propose positioning research according to how the descriptions and explanations (if any) in the research treat these dimensions. To do this, we model language contact using the idea that language is the (linguistic) behavior of a community whose members communicate with one another. Then, we consider the different ways that contact between such communities can happen, and so develop a scheme for categorizing language contact. We look at some descriptions of language in contact and consider whether they are wholly descriptive, or include an explanation; if explanatory, how does the explanation relate to our model of language as community behavior.
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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 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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 it