“They used to follow Ø river”: The Zero Article in York English
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.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Speakers of York English (UK) use a zero article with definite singular nouns (e.g., “They used to follow Ø river”), which is impossible in Standard English. We probe the possibility that this form is a remnant from Old English, when there were no articles as they are currently found in Modern English, rather than a more contemporary development. We trace the diachronic trajectory of the zero article in historical-descriptive grammars and test social and linguistic constraints on its use in York English in a logistic regression analysis. The results show that information structure is a significant predictor of the zero article across all generations of the community and that the zero article is used in the same way as it was used as far back as Old English. However, it exhibits heightened usage among the older and younger generations, exhibiting a U-shaped curve. We suggest that this pattern demonstrates longitudinal maintenance of a conservative feature, which is suppressed in middle-age as the result of social pressures. In this way, this case study adds insight into the fate of dialect features in contemporary speech communities. It also highlights the importance of combining insights from different strands in linguistics for understanding the evolution of syntactic variants like the zero article.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.189 |
| 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) | 0.000 | 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