Breaking down temporal distance in a Continental French variety: Future temporal reference in Vimeu
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This article examines future temporal reference (FTR) in the French spoken in Vimeu, a rural area of France where French evolved alongside Picard, a Gallo-Romance regional language. Unlike most French varieties, which favour periphrasis, Vimeu Picard favours the inflected form. By comparing French data from Picard–French bilinguals and French monolinguals, we assess the potential effect of Picard contact on Vimeu French. We hypothesized that bilinguals may favour the inflected form more than monolinguals, a hypothesis that was not verified. Instead, education is the best social predictor: speakers with a baccalauréat or higher disfavour the periphrastic future. Regarding linguistic constraints, we expected sentential polarity to constrain FTR (negation favours the inflected form), as in many varieties. Surprisingly, only temporal distance constrains FTR in our data: proximate events favour periphrasis, and do so even more strongly with events to occur within the minute. These results suggest that Vimeu French marks imminence through periphrasis.
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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 | 0.005 | 0.037 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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 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".