Exceptions to the SSP: Evidence from Ottawa for a Metatheoretical Approach
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Ottawa is an Algonquian language spoken by an estimated 8,000 people from southern Ontario to northern Michigan. It is one of several dialects of Ojibwe, including Severn Ojibwe, Algonquin and Northwestern Ojibwe. This chapter concerns the Ottawa dialect specifically. It is known by other names, including Odawa or Nishbaabemwin by its speakers, which means ‘Indian language.’ Ottawa’s phonology includes seventeen consonants, seven oral vowels, and four long nasal vowels. It also features vowel syncope and when combined with Ottawa’s system of inflectional morphology using prefixes and suffixes, allows for a variety of consonant clusters both syllable-initially and finally. In Ottawa, metrically weak vowels tend to be deleted. Standard feet consist of two syllables, one weak and one strong, respectively. The Sonority Sequencing Principle (SSP) proposes that the syllable nucleus is the peak of sonority within the syllable, with progressively decreasing sonority values in the onset and coda, if present. Because of Ottawa’s vowel syncope and inflectional morphology, there are many examples of syllables that violate the latter aspect of the SSP. While it is well-known that languages like English and Russian also violate the SSP in some of their possible syllable structures, this chapter will examine Ottawa, a less commonly studied language, for any support it can lend to the various approaches that have been proposed to account for exceptions to the SSP.
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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 | 0.012 | 0.035 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.020 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.012 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.017 | 0.001 |
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".