Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this article, the authors reconstruct the inherent variability found in mid-nineteenth-century American English by drawing on a corpus of semiliterate correspondence rich in nonstandard grammatical features, the Corpus of American Civil War Letters (CACWL). The primary focus is on a comparison of morphosyntactic variability (was/were variation and restrictive relativization strategies) in letters written between 1861 and 1865 by Civil War soldiers originating from Massachusetts and Alabama. Key findings include the elevated rate of was-leveling, particularly in the Alabama letters; the variable effect of the type-of-subject constraint on the selection of nonstandard was; and the scarcity of wh-relativizers in restrictive relative clauses. Contextualization of these findings in relation to an ongoing quantitative investigation of grammatical variation in four additional states represented in the CACWL (Pennsylvania, Ohio, North Carolina, and South Carolina) provides further evidence of structured heterogeneity in Civil War correspondence as well as the sensitivity of variable grammatical processes to regional differences. Taken together, the study’s findings demonstrate how judicious use of the CACWL can leverage new insights into nineteenth-century American English.
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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 | 0.001 |
| 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) | 0.001 | 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 teacher head, 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".