Palatalisation can be quantity-sensitive: Dorsal Fricative Assimilation in Liverpool English
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper shows that the Liverpool English dorsal fricative, derived through the lenition of /k/, is subject to place of articulation assimilation, driven by the preceding vowel. This is similar to the vowel-driven aspects of typical perseverative Dorsal Fricative Assimilation (a type of palatalisation), as found, for example, in the Germanich-Laut~ach-Lautalternation, where (among other things) a preceding front high or mid vowel is followed by the front dorsal [ç], and other vowels are followed by a back dorsal. However, the majority Liverpool English pattern differs from previously described cases of Dorsal Fricative Assimilation in that [ç] only occurs followinglongfront high vowels, while a back dorsal remains after their short congeners. This type of quantity-sensitive pattern in assimilation has not been reported before. We use Centre of Gravity measurements to investigate this pattern of place assimilation, and argue for the use of an innovative normalisation technique for consonant measurements, based on measurements of /k/ aspiration in a linear regression model. We thus both expand the taxonomy of what is known to be possible in phonology and also provide new detail in the description of Liverpool English (including a proposal for the featural analysis of its vowel system).
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.002 |
| 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 | 0.001 |
| 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".