Variability in English Yes/No Questions: A Study of Communicative Functions
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper investigates variability in the production of English yes/no questions. It, further, probes the role of communicative functions in the construction of such variants by Canadian English native speakers as well as the role of gender in the use of such communicative functions. For this purpose, thirty Canadian English native speakers performed the Edinburgh Map Task and made English yes/no question variants considering the context and functions of the questions. The data were subject to Chi-square and correlational analyses. Based on the results, variability was observed in English yes/no questions. Moreover, particular English yes/no question variants were associated with particular communicative functions. In the usage of the communicative functions, Canadian English males and females showed different linguistic behavior. Regarding the correlation between gender and communicative functions, it was indicated that the use of communicative functions in the construction of yes/no question variants was not gender-based.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
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 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, 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".