The Future’s Path in Three Acadian French Varieties
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In the present study, we investigate the expression of future temporal reference in three closely-related varieties of Atlantic Canada Acadian French, varieties which differ substantially in their sociolinguistic histories. The three communities (Baie Sainte-Marie, Nova Scotia; L’Anse-à-Canards, Newfoundland; and the Iles de la Madeleine, Quebec) have experienced varying types and degrees of dialect contact since their original settlement. At one end of the continuum, Baie Sainte-Marie had the most homogeneous settlement pattern and has been largely isolated from other French varieties, including other Acadian varieties, for several centuries. The Iles de la Madeleine is at the other extreme, involving the most heterogeneous mix of original settlers and a subsequent history which is defined by waves of dialect contact. In an intermediary position, L’Anse-à-Canard's settlement history is less heterogeneous than that of the Iles de la Madeleine but did involve late 19th century dialect contact with European French. The study is based on linguistic data for speakers born between 1873 and 1925, which constitute some of the earliest audio recordings for the varieties, along with sociohistorical data drawn from nominal censuses, cadastral maps, family genealogies, etc. Our goal is to determine the extent to which the grammaticalization path of the periphrastic future (which would ultimately overtake the inflected future as the majority variant in other spoken varieties) would be mirrored in the three communities. The results of multivariate analyses show, for Baie Sainte-Marie, the earliest stage in the evolution of the periphrastic future: it is still associated with imminent contexts. For L’Anse-à-Canards, we see the strong association of the variant with proximal contexts more generally. For these two communities, then, the use of the periphrastic future has not spread to distal contexts. Finally, for The Iles de la Madeleine, we find some weakening of the temporal distance effect and the emergence of a polarity constraint not attested for the other Acadian communities: negative utterances are associated with the inflected future, a finding resembling that found in variationist research on varieties of Laurentian French, wherein the periphrastic future has become the general marker of futurity. We explain the acquisition of the polarity constraint in terms of contact with speakers of Laurentian varieties. In sum, the historical trajectory of the future variable is reflected in intercommunity variation for the earliest linguistic attestations for spoken Acadian French.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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 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".