The Correlation of Tonal Shifts and Dialect Use with Socioeconomic Class in Dalian, China
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Drawing on Professor William Labov’s seminal 1962 experiment, this paper examines tonal variation amongst employees of department stores targeting three different socioeconomic classes in Dalian, China. The experiment recorded pronunciations of the tone of yī (the word “first” in the phrase “first floor” 一楼), which is pronounced in first tone in standard Mandarin and shifted to the third tone in Dalian dialect. In this experiment, it was hypothesized that for the four department stores studied, an employee’s tone in pronunciation of first tone words would shift towards the third tone the most in the store catering to lower socioeconomic classes and shift the least in the store catering to higher socioeconomic classes. From analyzing the data collected, the non-first tone pronunciations were the most frequent in the lowest ranking store and less frequent in the higher ranking store. Therefore, the salespersons’ tonal shift in pronunciation is shown to correlate with the socioeconomic class of the customers being targeted.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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 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".