Unstressed periphrastic <i>do</i> — from Southwest England to Newfoundland?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article discusses possible reasons for the (near-)absence of a feature from Newfoundland Vernacular English (NVE) that was present in both of its major donor dialects, namely the varieties of Southwest (SW) England and Ireland. Unstressed periphrastic do, the feature under investigation, is used as a tense carrier and marker of habituality in Southwestern dialects and — in a more restricted context — in Irish English (IrE). Modern NVE shows only traces of periphrastic do. All of these uses are (a) of IrE origin and (b) recessive (cf. e.g. Clarke 2004b: 305). If all settlers had used the feature at the time they emigrated to Newfoundland, it is extremely unlikely that it should have been lost in NVE, one of the most conservative varieties of English, but maintained, at least to a certain extent, in the much less conservative modern varieties of SW English and IrE. This paper suggests possible stages of the life of periphrastic do in Newfoundland. With the help of evidence from literature on SW English dialects from the 19th and 20th centuries, it is argued that it is unlikely that all settlers were do users when arriving in Newfoundland. Moreover, a competing variant, generalized verbal ‑s, a pattern typical of NVE to the present day, existed in some of the settlers’ grammars (both SW English and IrE). It is assumed that periphrastic do, if it ever existed in NVE in those uses typical of SW English dialects, has been eradicated through contact with dialects that either used generalized ‑s or a more standard system.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot 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.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".