REFLEXES OF THE TRANSITIVE BE PERFECT IN CANADA AND IN THE US: A COMPARATIVE CORPUS STUDY
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The present paper examines the geographical distribution of three reflexes of a transitive be perfect in North America: done, finished, started (e.g.I'm done my dinner).This paper is a corpus study of Canadian Newsstand Complete and Newspaper Source Plus -commercial databases of regional and national mass media in Canada and the United States, respectively.A total of 1217 tokens have been found in Canadian sources, and none in the US ones.Constructional tokens in Canada have been found to be proportionately distributed across provinces and municipalities.Based on these findings, it is argued that the done my dinner construction is a feature that sets Canadian English (as a theoretical abstraction) apart from American English.It is emphasized, though, that the construction has been attested in some dialectal pockets in the US such as Vermont.The geographical restriction of the construction to Canada and selected dialectal areas in the US is hypothesized to have arisen from a Scottish founder effect; evidence from fictional literature and migration studies is presented as support.It is further argued that the construction is a retention in North American English rather than innovation because its earliest occurrence dates back to the middle of the 19 th century.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.009 | 0.022 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".