Rhotic Lenition as a Marker of a Dominant Character Type in Northern Mandarin Chinese
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper looks at social identity with respect to two types of rhotacization: vowel rhotacization, in which a vowel is r-coloured, and consonant rhotacization (i.e. rhotic lenition). Recent studies (Zhang 2005, Zhang 2008) have investigated character type as a sociolinguistic variable affecting rhotacization in Mandarin Chinese speech. Rhotacization, in turn, has sociocultural associations that differ by both geographic region and regional character types (Lee 2007). I argue that in Northern China, there is a correlation between rhotic lenition and dominant, particularly masculine, social identities. In this study, I interview thirteen Mandarin speakers from Henan Province, a distinctly northern—but not northeastern—prefecture. Participants are interviewed and possible lenited tokens are counted. I hypothesize that a positive correlation between identity and lenition will be seen in speakers who perceive themselves as having dominant personalities; that people who identify with a dominant character type will exhibit more tokens of consonant rhotacization in casual speech. To explain this phenomenon, I take the view that there is a prevalent linguistic ideology linking vowel rhotacization with rurality, low social class, and Northeastern identity. I will show that among speakers of Henan Mandarin, vowel rhotacization is an overt marker of this identity, whereas consonant rhotacization (i.e. rhotic lenition) is less overt. Rhotic lenition is a unique and critical variable which functions as a marker of a dominant character type without establishing a Northeast identity.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 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) | 0.002 | 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