Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Atlas of North American English (Labov, Ash, & Boberg, 2006) found that dialect diversity in North America was increasing, via the continuing advancement of regional sound changes such as the Northern Cities Shift (NCS). In the decade since the Atlas’s publication, however, indications have emerged that that conclusion was premature, with multiple studies finding retreat from the NCS in communities where it was expected to be stable or advancing (e.g. Wagner, Mason, Nesbitt, Pevan, & Savage, 2016; Driscoll & Lape 2015). This dissertation reports a real-time study demonstrating that the loss of NCS can be rapid indeed. This study examines the loss of the NCS in Ogdensburg, a small city in rural Northern New York, on the Canadian border. On the basis of nine speakers interviewed there in 2008, Dinkin (2009, 2013) described Ogdensburg as the northeasternmost limit of the NCS, with some evidence that the NCS was advancing in apparent time. Furthermore, the data suggested an incipient merger of the low back vowels LOT and THOUGHT in the community, a feature that has been believed to be incompatible with the NCS (Labov et al., 2006). In this study, I compare those nine speakers interviewed in 2008 with a new sample of 39 speakers from the same city that I interviewed in 2016, and supplement speech production data with social perception data. The results suggest that, in the eight years between 2008 and 2016, the NCS apparently disappeared from Ogdensburg, a change that is visible in nearly all phonemes of the NCS. It appears that the community is orienting toward a new system, the Elsewhere Shift, including the merger of LOT and THOUGHT, a development that has been reported in other traditional NCS communities as well (e.g. Wagner et al., 2016). It seems that increasing negative evaluation of at least two NCS features may have been the driving force behind the abandonment of the NCS in Ogdensburg, and the points in apparent-time at which the changes emerge in the data suggest that these evaluations and the consequential restructuring of the community’s vowel system might be a response to a myriad of social changes in the community in the second half of the 20th century (Coupland, e.g. 2009).
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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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.085 | 0.009 |
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".