New perspectives on an ol' variable: (t,d) in British English
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
A quantitative analysis of -t,-d deletion in contemporary British English reveals that preceding and following phonological contexts are significant, indicating that there is a universal constraint on -t,-d deletion consistent with universal phonetic and phonological properties of segments. However, in contrast to previous research, morphological class is not significant. Furthermore, our results do not support the hypothesis that -t,-d deletion is a variable rule that applies both lexically and postlexically. In sum, -t,-d deletion is a robust phenomenon in contemporary British English, but there are striking differences between British and North American varieties. Such differences suggest that -t,-d deletion is an ideal case study for further investigation of the phonology-phonetics interface, and adds to the available evidence from which an explanatory account of -t,-d deletion can be constructed.The first author acknowledges with gratitude the generous support of the Economic and Social Research Council of the United Kingdom (the ESRC) for research grant #R000238287, Grammatical Variation and Change in British English: Perspectives from York. We are also grateful to Ms. Heather A. Davies, who made it possible for us to work for a time in the same geographical location, as a result of which our original conception of the article was transformed. We would like to thank members of the phonetics/phonology research group at the University of York and our audiences at the following conferences for their comments and suggestions: VIEW 2000, University of Essex; NWAV 30, North Carolina State University, 2001; and the Biennial Meeting of the British Association of Academic Phoneticians, University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne 2002. Our anonymous reviewers deserve special mention as their insights prompted exacting revisions to our original manuscript. The result, we believe, is a stronger article; however, if points of contention remain, we welcome further discussion.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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) | 0.002 | 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