Phonological Transfer as a Forerunner of Merger in Upstate New York
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Herold (1990) discusses three mechanisms by which phonemic merger can take place: expansion, approximation, and transfer. A fourth possibility Herold touches on but does not explore might be called phonological transfer: as in (lexical) transfer, words move abruptly from one phonemic class to another; but rather than one lexeme at a time being transferred, all words of a particular phonological class move simultaneously. This paper provides evidence that phonological transfer is playing a role in the movement toward merger of /o/ (as in lot) and /oh/ (as in thought) in Upstate New York. Words containing (olF)—i.e., historical /o/ followed by /l/ plus a labiovelar, as in golf and revolve—are produced with /oh/ rather than /o/ in 74 percent of tokens; this use of /oh/ is increasing in apparent time. Many speakers using /oh/ in (olF) words have an otherwise clear phonemic distinction between /o/ and /oh/; however, the geographic distribution of this phonological transfer is correlated with other indices of progress toward the low back merger. This indicates that phonological transfer can be regarded here as an early sign of merger in progress, and that a single merger can proceed by two mechanisms simultaneously (here, approximation and phonological transfer).
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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 | 0.001 | 0.121 |
| 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 it