'Anything <i>you</i> can do, <i>tu</i> can do better': <i>tu</i> and <i>vous</i> as substitutes for indefinite <i>on</i> in French
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
Research on Montreal French (Laberge and Sankoff 1979; Thibault 1991) has shown a spectacular rise in the use of indefinite tu (or vous ) in recent decades, at the expense of the standard form on . Although grammars of French have traditionally passed over indefinite tu / vous in silence, Ashby's study of Tours French (1992) confirmed that the phenomenon exists in metropolitan French also. The historical time‐depth of indefinite tu/vous has apparently not been explored previously, though Posner (1997) has suggested that indefinite tu is a modern feature, found especially in Canada. A survey of indefinite tu/vous in earlier periods and in a range of varieties forms the first part of this paper. Secondly, drawing on a corpus of French spoken in Picardy, northern France, the paper investigates the extent to which this use of the 2nd person pronouns: (i) helps to avoid ambiguity; (ii) co‐occurs with another grammatical variable. Unlike the surveys of Montreal and Tours, the Picardy corpus includes a large majority of informants who used tu to address the interviewer, and this too is explored as a potential influence on speakers’ use of 2nd person pronouns with indefinite reference.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.017 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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