Phonetics as a complement to phonology in the Canadian Shift
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Previous accounts of the Canadian Shift have interpreted this diachronic change in vowel pronunciation as a purely phonetic consequence of the low back LOT-THOUGHT vowel merger; however, such an analysis does not transparently explain the strong connection between the (phonological) low back merger and the subsequent (phonetic) retraction of the TRAP vowel in the acoustic vowel space. This paper addresses this issue by presenting an analysis of the shift that combines the approaches of Modified Contrastive Specification theory and the Contrastive Hierarchy—two phonological frameworks—with phonetic insights from Vowel Dispersion-Focalization theory. We propose that the catalyst of the Canadian Shift is a three-way vowel merger, in combination with a simultaneous change in the underlying feature specifications of the TRAP vowel. This results in a phonology that allows for the TRAP and DRESS vowels to succumb to the influence of the phonetic principles of dispersion and focalization. This hypothesis is illustrated by comparison of data from 59 speakers in Thunder Bay, Ontario, and Industrial Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. Our analysis predicts that a Canadian Shift-type phonetic change will occur in any North American dialect of English where the PALM-LOT-THOUGHT merger occurs, unless an intervening phonological change alters systemic contrasts.
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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 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| 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".