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Record W2500685048 · doi:10.1075/ahs.4.01bri

Studying real-time change in the adverbial subjunctive

2015· book-chapter· en· W2500685048 on OpenAlex
Laurel J. Brinton

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.
aboutThe title or abstract carries a Canadian signal from the geographic lexicon.

Bibliographic record

VenueAdvances in historical sociolinguistics · 2015
Typebook-chapter
Languageen
FieldArts and Humanities
TopicLexicography and Language Studies
Canadian institutionsUniversity of British Columbia
Fundersnot available
KeywordsAdverbialHistoryLinguisticsPhilosophy

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

The dearth of real-time studies of the histories of transatlantic English varieties can be attributed to the lack of readily accessible, electronic corpora. However, for Canadian English (CanE) we now have the Bank of Canadian English (BCE), which consists of c. 2.5 million words from written and spoken sources extending from 1505 to the present. As a lexicographic database, the BCE does not constitute a balanced corpus, but from the onset it was designed to serve as a tool for corpus linguistic study. This paper seeks to determine the utility of the BCE for such study with a test case: the use of the subjunctive in adverbial (if) clauses. After first establishing that CanE patterns with American English (AmE) in having higher rates of subjunctive use in the present-day, the paper analyzes historical data extracted from the BCE to show that CanE, like British English (BrE) shows an increase in subjunctive forms in the first half of the eighteenth century (perhaps the continued effects of prescriptivism) followed by a significant decline beginning in the second half of the century. The generally higher use of the subjunctive in both AmE and CanE may in fact be evidence of “colonial revival” rather than “colonial lag”. There is tentative evidence in the BCE of a twentieth-century revival of the subjunctive, which has also been postulated for AmE (Leech et al. 2009). The developmental patterns in the BCE thus parallel those found in much larger corpora and give us quite accurate information about the history of this particular post-colonial variety.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesMeta-epidemiology (narrow)
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Other · Consensus signal: Other
Teacher disagreement score0.893
Threshold uncertainty score1.000

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0010.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.001
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.001
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

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.

Opus teacher head0.095
GPT teacher head0.299
Teacher spread0.204 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it