Social and Linguistic Constraints on Relativizer Omission in Canadian English
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study addresses the social and linguistic constraints on relativizer omission in restrictive relative clauses in a mainstream urban variety of Canadian English. Drawing on the framework of variationist sociolinguistics, the authors test an array of factors that have been traditionally implicated in the choice of relative marker (e.g., syntactic function of the relative marker; animacy and definiteness of the antecedent head NP; length of the relative clause), in addition to investigating less widely researched factors, such as the informational content of the matrix clause and the lexical specificity of the head NP. A variable rule analysis of nonsubject relative clauses extracted from 19 speakers stratified by age, sex, and education reveals that relativizer omission is socially sensitive and that properties of the matrix clause and adjacency effects are key determinants in the selection of the zero variant. Recurrent structural configurations exhibited by zero marked relative clauses in vernacular discourse are indicative of grammaticalization. Comparison with other varieties of English reveals that relativizer omission fails to pattern uniformly, suggesting that there is no vernacular norm in this area of the grammar. This absence of uniformity calls into question recent attempts by researchers to formulate a unitary account of relativizer omission by appealing to putatively general language processing constraints.
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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 | 0.003 |
| 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 | 0.001 |
| 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".