MétaCan
Menu
Back to cohort

Nominal Contact in Michif

2018· book· en· W2793259764 on OpenAlex

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

aboutThe title or abstract carries a Canadian signal from the geographic lexicon.
no affNo Canadian affiliation: this work is invisible to an affiliation-only frame.
No Canadian affiliation. An affiliation-only frame, the usual design, would never have seen this work. It is one of the works that make the case for inverting the frame.

Bibliographic record

VenueOxford University Press eBooks · 2018
Typebook
Languageen
FieldArts and Humanities
TopicLinguistics and Discourse Analysis
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsLinguisticsNoun phraseSyntaxPluralGenitive caseNounHistoryGrammarLanguage contactComputer sciencePhilosophy

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Michif is an endangered language spoken by approximately a few hundred Métis people, mostly located in Manitoba and Saskatchewan, Canada. Michif is usually categorized as a <italic>mixed language</italic> (Bakker 1997; Thomason 2003), due to the inability to trace it back to a single language family, with the majority of verbal elements coming from Plains Cree (Algonquian) and the majority of nominal elements coming from French (Indo-European). This book investigates Bakker’s (1997) often cited claim that the morphology of each source language is not reduced, with the language combining full French noun phrase grammar and Plains Cree verbal grammar. The book focuses on the syntax and semantics of the French-source noun phrase. While Michif has features that are obviously due to heavy contact with French (two mass/count systems, two plural markers, two gender systems), the Michif noun phrase mainly behaves like an Algonquian noun phrase. Even some of the French morphosyntax that it borrowed is used to Algonquianize non-Algonquian borrowings: the French-derived articles are only required on non-Algonquian nouns, and are used to make non-Algonquian borrowings visible to the Algonquian syntax. Michif is thus shown to be best characterized as an Algonquian language, with heavy French borrowing. With such a quintessentially ‘mixed’ language shown to essentially <italic>not</italic> mix grammars, the usefulness of this category for analysing synchronic patterns is questioned, much in the same way that scholars such as DeGraff (2000, 2003, 2005) and Mufwene (1986, 2001, 2008, 2015) question the usefulness of the <italic>creole language</italic> classification.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesMeta-epidemiology (narrow)
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Other · Consensus signal: Other
Teacher disagreement score0.953
Threshold uncertainty score1.000

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0010.000

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.

Opus teacher head0.034
GPT teacher head0.216
Teacher spread0.183 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it