Assessing contact-induced language change: The use of subject relative markers in Quebec English ∗
Bibliographic record
Abstract
To investigate the relationship between language contact and language change, this pilot study undertakes a comparative variationist analysis of relativizers used in subject function in mainstream Canadian and Quebec English. Overall rate of who is the same in both varieties and in multivariate analyses neither variety nor bilingual ability is selected as significant to variant choice, arguing against convergence. Differences in the linguistic conditioning of who across varieties suggest that it is mainstream English, not Quebec English, which has changed. While a breakdown of variant use by sex and age initially suggests contact-induced change, a comparison of speaker cohorts across varieties and a consideration of speaker characteristics fail to confirm convergence. Contributing to the debate on the use of WH-relativizers in spoken English, this study demonstrates that who is a viable option in Canadian English. It also provides evidence against claims that bilingualism is correlated with susceptibility to convergence.
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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 | 0.003 |
| 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) | 0.001 | 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".