Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study investigates a discourse-pragmatic use of the word wait in spoken North American English. This function is an extension from an original lexical meaning of pausing or lingering, which has expanded to indicate a pause in discourse as a speaker reflects on or corrects an earlier topic. Over 340 examples from 211 individuals permit comparative sociolinguistic methods and statistical modeling to offer an early assessment of the variation among alternates of this innovative use and to test for broad social and linguistic factors in order to understand the underlying processes. The results expose notable recent developments: older people use the longer, more temporally specified variants wait a minute and wait a second, while wait alone is increasing in apparent time, with women leading its advance. The robust increase in the use of wait alone (e.g., I haven’t seen her yet. No wait. Yes, I have), co-occurrence with other markers (e.g., no), and the function of self-correction/commentary arises after 1970. The unique contribution of socially stratified corpora also demonstrates that this development follows well-known principles of linguistic change, as wait develops from a verb with temporal specification to a full-fledged discourse-pragmatic marker on the left periphery.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
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 | 0.000 | 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 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
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".