The social embedding of a syntactic alternation: Variable particle placement in Ontario English
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract The present work investigates the effects of social constraints on word order variation in particle placement in Ontario English, Canada. While previous research has documented numerous linguistic factors conditioning the choice of variant, social correlates have so far remained unexplored. To address this gap, we analyze 6,047 variable phrasal verbs from the vernacular speech of six communities in Ontario. These data were coded for length of the direct object, verb semantics, community, and the individual's education, gender, age, and occupation. Our analyses confirm previous findings that variation in particle placement is predominantly determined by direct object length. However, we also expose significant social and geographic factors, and importantly an effect of age, with younger speakers using the joined variant more than older speakers. Further analysis confirms that the latter effect is consistent across communities, indicating a change in progress, possibly due to ongoing grammaticalization of particles in the verb phrase.
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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 | 0.000 | 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) | 0.000 | 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