The Stuff of Change: General Extenders in Toronto, Canada
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
This article examines general extenders (GEs) in the English spoken in Toronto, Canada, using a 1.2-million-word corpus stratified by age, sex, and education. Employing quantitative techniques, the authors assess the nature of the system, particularly the possibility that it has undergone recent grammaticalization. Diagnostic tests for phonetic reduction, decategorization, semantic change, and pragmatic shift reveal that only decategorization is visible in apparent time. Otherwise, older and younger speakers share most of the same patterns. Yet there is a dramatic shift happening in that the form stuff is rapidly becoming the predominant GE.The authors conclude that in contrast to the United Kingdom, the GEs in Toronto are not grammaticalizing but are undergoing lexical replacement. These findings suggest that discourse-pragmatic features may differ markedly across varieties and further that putative indicators of grammaticalization may not always operate in tandem. GEs provide a unique opportunity to study social and linguistic influences on discourse-pragmatic variation.
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.
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 | 0.119 |
| 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