The Development of <i>And Stuff</i> in Canadian English: A Longitudinal Study of Apparent Grammaticalization
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper examines the development of and stuff, a general extender (GE), in Canadian English in longitudinal perspective. Previous research (Cheshire 2007; Tagliamonte & Denis 2010; Pichler & Levey 2011) finds suggestive evidence that and stuff and other GEs have undergone grammaticalization over their development. However, when viewed in apparent time, there is little evidence of ongoing grammaticalization; rather only vestiges of apparent previous grammaticalization remain. This paper takes up Pichler and Levey’s (2011) call for an appropriate real-time benchmark of comparison to enable a more thorough understanding of the historical development of these features. A collection of oral histories recorded in the 1970s and 1980s with elderly residents of three communities in southern Ontario, Canada, is used as a proxy for comparison to Tagliamonte and Denis’s (2010) analysis of the Toronto English Archive. By tracking the development of and stuff over more than a century of apparent time, this paper finds three changes in progress: (1) a lexical replacement such that and stuff becomes the majority variant in the variable system; (2) a morphological clipping process such that longer GEs such as and stuff like that lose the comparative element like that; and (3) the semantic bleaching of the set-marking meaning of and stuff. While this last change is a necessary part of grammaticalization, in the absence of phonetic reduction, decategorialization, and pragmatic shift, it is not sufficient evidence according to grammaticalization theory (e.g., Heine 2003; Traugott 2003; Diewald 2010).
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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 | 0.003 | 0.200 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 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) | 0.000 | 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