Footing is Not Always about Stress: Formalizing Variable High Vowel Deletion in Québec French
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The existence of foot structure in (Québec) French is disputed, since the only position of obligatory prominence in the language is the right edge of the phonological phrase. In this paper, we propose that a segmental process, namely, high vowel deletion (HVD), supports the existence of iterative iambic footing in Québec French. We report on a judgement task with auditorily-presented stimuli in which native speakers judged whether words with and without HVD sounded natural. The results show that (i) HVD is preferred in even-numbered syllables from the right word edge, (ii) HVD is preferred when the resulting consonantal cluster mirrors an ill-formed branching onset, and (iii) although non-deletion is overall preferred to deletion, deletion is preferred in one context: when the target vowel is at a suffix boundary and in foot-dependent positions.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| 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 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".