A Simple Vista: Lexical Variation in Puerto Rico (with an Atlas)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ABSTRACT. This study carries on the linguistic atlas tradition. It focuses on the vernacular Spanish of Puerto Rico. The methodology consists of an online image identifying survey with the purpose of mapping dialectal zones based on lexical variation. One hundred and ten surveys were collected and spatial distribution of the words' variants was mapped according to hometown and residence, resulting in patterns of free variation and diatopic diffusions. A general marked line showing the diatopic or geographical variation was found. It forms an isogloss dividing the territory in West and East, but patterns of swamping suggest that the boundaries are fading. In general, the maps show that the dialect geography in Puerto Rico is in flux. ********** One of the most obvious levels of dialect variation is the lexicon, or vocabulary of a language. (Wolfram and Schilling-Estes 2008: 64) 1. INTRODUCTION. Dialectologies, and sociolinguistics, have been studying how language changes and varies within and across geographical and social loci. The study of language variation dates back to the quest for the protolanguages, where tracing the evolution of words was essential to establish filial relations between languages. Formal dialect geography was developed in the late 19th century with Georg Wenker's postal survey. Pronunciation and lexical variation became a very popular subject, as attested by the proliferation of linguistic atlases in the 20th century; for example, Kurath's Linguistic Atlas of New England (published in 3 volumes, 1939-43) and the 1930 foundation of the Linguistic Atlas of the United States and Canada, LAUSC as well as the Atlas Linguistico de Iberoamerica, among others. (1) Linguistic atlas production is still in motion. There are Web-based surveys like the Harvard Dialect Survey (2011, now closed), the Linguistic Atlas Project, the webpage Great Soda vs. Pop Controversy, and the Atlas Linguistico de la Peninsula Iberica, which use the Internet alongside new technologies making the process of mapping spatial distributions a more attainable goal. Not all these projects are focused on lexical variation; some map other changes like pronunciation, but they all have in common the attestation of how dialects are changing. Lexical variation is one of the most glaring of the changes in motion within a language. The subject of this study is the lexical variation in the Spanish spoken on the island of Puerto Rico with the purpose of determining if the existence of dialectal zones in the territory can be identified. The study pays homage to the linguistic atlas tradition. 2. PUERTO RICO. 2.1. GEOGRAPHY AND DEMOGRAPHICS. The island of Puerto Rico is the easternmost and smallest of the Antillas Menores. The total area of the territory is approximately 3.315 square miles, or 100 by 35 miles as Puerto Ricans describe it. According to the CIA World Factbook (2012), the population in the island of Puerto Rico is estimated to be 3.690.923. The population of Puerto Rico is distributed as seen on Map 1. Notice that the Area Metropolitana, with San Juan, the capital, at its center, is the darkest area at the northeast. To the south, Ponce is the most populated town, and Mayaguez is the most populated to the west. Age distribution among the population is: 0-14 years: 18.8%; 15-64 years: 65.4% and 65 years and over: 15.8%. Most of the population (99%) is considered urban, as reflected by the population density of the urban areas illustrated on Map1, and 94.1% of the population is literate (persons 15 years and older who can read and write). (2) 2.2. LANGUAGE SITUATION IN PUERTO RICO. Puerto Rico's language situation has been a topic of discussion for a long time. This was especially true between 1990 and 1993, when the island's official language was changed twice. Following is a list of main events related to language policy in Puerto Rico (3): 1900--The island is surrended to the United States military authority. …
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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 | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| 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) | 0.000 | 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 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".