Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article will look at political treatments of language in Samuel Beckett’s early novel Watt and place the novel’s linguistic scepticism in conversation with three authors, the lexicographer Samuel Johnson, the language theorist Felix Mauthner, and the English-born, Canadian parodist Stephen Leacock. The paper will argue that Beckett, like Leacock, engages in Mauthnerian critiques of language, destabilising Johnsonian formulae for language standardisation. But while Leacock fails to develop the political implications of his critique of language, Beckett’s understanding of language standardisation is implicitly political, informed by Johnson’s conception of speech as the predicate of national identity, a standard for inclusion which Watt gleefully antagonises. Challenging nationalist calls for controls on language, Watt interrogates the ways that campaigns for linguistic unity will engender exclusionary attitudes towards the nonconforming and bar access to that speech and identity which falls outside of normative frameworks.
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.
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 | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.017 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
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".