MétaCan
Menu
Back to cohort
Record W33314200

The Ausbau of Present-Day Scots

2006· article· en· W33314200 on OpenAlex

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

aboutThe title or abstract carries a Canadian signal from the geographic lexicon.
no affNo Canadian affiliation: this work is invisible to an affiliation-only frame.
No Canadian affiliation. An affiliation-only frame, the usual design, would never have seen this work. It is one of the works that make the case for inverting the frame.

Bibliographic record

VenueScottish language · 2006
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldArts and Humanities
TopicLinguistics, Language Diversity, and Identity
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsScotsSociologyLinguisticsPhilosophy
DOInot available

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

The aim of this paper is to give an overview of two aspects of modern-day Scots: its range of use (which is larger than sometimes assumed) and its standardisation (or lack thereof). Both aspects have come to be subsumed under the term ausbau, (1) following its introduction by the German philologist Heinz Kloss in 1967. The term itself has led to some degree of confusion, not least, perhaps, due to the difficulty of translating it into English. We will therefore start with a closer look at what ausbau is and how the term has been used. After that, the state of Scots ausbau in relation to domains and standardisation at the beginning of the twenty-first century will be investigated before, finally, we examine the significance of and motivation for the ausbau of Scots. This paper is not the first study of its kind. In 1979, A.J. Aitken gave an overview of the state of ausbau of Scots at that time, with a special focus on educational and academic contexts. McClure, in the same volume, looked at the 'range of uses' from a more literary perspective. This paper aims to be much broader in outlook, paying attention to as wide a range of domains (2) in which Scots is used at the beginning of the twenty-first century as possible. However, even for a vernacular whose range of uses is somewhat limited, any attempt at describing something as complex as the state of ausbau cannot claim to be comprehensive. Placing the emphasis on breadth rather than depth, but including individual cases that are considered particularly interesting or relevant, this paper operates within the following limitations: (i) It is restricted to the ausbau of Scots in Scotland. International varieties of Scots (as found in Ulster or Canada) are not considered. (ii) The paper is concerned only or mainly with the situation as it presents itself at the beginning of the twenty-first century. For historical overviews see Gorlach 1998 Ch. 5 and 2002. (iii) No consideration is given to works on Scots but not in Scots. Researching and writing on a variety does not, in my view, automatically contribute to its ausbau. This means that a large bulk of academic work on the Scots language is not reflected upon here. (iv) Finally, literature, one of the strongholds of Scots, can only be mentioned in passing and for the sake of completeness. There are a number of works on Scots literature that deal with the topic in a much more comprehensive way than can possibly be expected in the scope of the present paper. 1. WHAT IS AUSBAU? Stemming from the question of how language can be distinguished from dialect, Kloss distinguishes two qualities by virtue of which speech varieties can be assigned the label of 'language'. They could be structurally different from a (geographically) neighbouring variety, in which case they would be labelled as 'abstand languages', with 'abstand' being the German term for distance. This is the case for Gaelic as opposed to English in Scotland and Ireland or for French and Italian as opposed to German in Switzerland, and this is the traditionally and among non-linguists widely accepted criterion for the recognition of a variety as a language. Alternatively, and perhaps less palpable at first sight, Kloss labelled varieties that attain their language status 'by development' as 'ausbau languages' (Kloss 1967: 29): 'Languages belonging in this category are recognized as such because of having been shaped or reshaped, moulded or remoulded--as the case may be--in order to become a standardized tool of literary expression. We might say that an Ausbausprache is called a language by virtue of its having been reshaped, i.e. by virtue of its reshapedness if there were such a word.' By setting the (more or less) absolute criterion of 'standardized tool of literary expression', Kloss leaves little room for questions of degree: most varieties will either clearly pass or fail this criterion. (3) Kloss's terminology of abstand and ausbau languages has been variously taken up in linguistics throughout the Western world; his definition of the terms, however, has sometimes been altered or even confused. …

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.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.001
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesInsufficient payload (model declined to judge)
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: Not applicable
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.150
Threshold uncertainty score1.000

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.001
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0010.000

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.

Opus teacher head0.009
GPT teacher head0.210
Teacher spread0.201 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it