Codex and Context: Reading Old French Verse Narrative in Manuscript by Keith Busby (review)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
MLR, 100.4, 2005 1109 Christie, Albert Valdman, Philip Baker, and Katja Ploog, who discuss issues such as definitions of Creole, emerging norms, the linguistic origins of riddles in Mauritian Creole, and syntactic variation in the French of Abidjan. Section 2 deals with North America, addressing some questions that have already attracted much attention from researchers, such as the issue discussed by Helene Blondeau in her article on the 'pronoms toniques du pluriel' variable in Montreal French, and others that are much less documented, e.g. the French of the Metis in Western Canada (by Robert A. Papen). Raymond Mougeon's contribution on French in Ontario gives a detailed presentation on the background and specificity of the va? riety.The final article in this section, by Dan Golembeski and Kevin J.Rottet, takes a broader sweep, looking at variation of one linguistic feature, the imperfect (e.g. 'ils sontaient' for 'ils etaient'), in various North American contexts. Section 3 contains fivecontributions. Jacques Durand and Chantal Lyche examine phonological variation in the vocalic systems of two varieties of hexagonal French: those of Grenoble and the 'Midi', in the context ofthe 'Phonologie du francais contemporain ' project. John N. Green and Marie-Anne Hintze analyse the status ofthe 'h aspire' with reference to a corpus collected in Lille. The third article in this section is also concerned with phonological issues in France: Tim Pooley discusses the 'o ouvert' in closed syllables in northern French. Aidan Coveney's article looks at vari? ation between 'elles' and 'ils' as clitic pronoun subjects in spoken French, specifically the use of 'ils' to referto exclusively female referents,concluding that 'elles' is much more frequent in France than in Quebec, and that the use of 'ils' rather than 'elles' reflects the bias towards the masculine which is inherent in French and in other lan? guages. The final article in this section, by Giuseppe Manno, deals with the question of 'deregionalisation ou dedialectisation' of French in Switzerland. The final part of the book is devoted to tributes to Gertrud Aub-Buscher, in honour of her outstanding contribution to French Studies. One of the many strengths of this volume is the rigorous research that underpins it. One could hardly complain that its treatment of varieties is not comprehensive, since this was not the authors' intention. However, given the richness and ambition of the volume, the addition of an index would have been useful for cross-referencing purposes. Variation as a sociolinguistic phenomenon is now a well-established area of research interest and the publication of this volume represents a very significant and impressive contribution to the study of variation in French. University College Cork Maeve Conrick Codex and Context: Reading Old French Verse Narrative in Manuscript. By Keith Busby. 2 vols. (Faux Titre, 221) Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi. 2002. xi + 941 pp. ?90 (vol. 1); ?85 (vol. 11). ISBN 90-420-1379-6 (set). This study, both monumental in depth and detail and modest in conclusions, repre? sents a summa of the research activities of its author, who is yet only halfway through his scholarly career, and a vade-mecum forall serious medievalists. In its rich deploy? ment ofthe most up-to-date publications its bibliographical usefulness can hardly be exaggerated. It is nothing less than an encyclopaedia ofmedieval French literature (in verse and before 1400) in its materiality. As such it is a colossal achievement and it is difficultto imagine anyone else who could have written it. We are presented with no overarching theory or methodology, but there is a polemical thrust to the book. Keith Busby wishes to reintegrate medieval studies, not by fanning the flames of modish theory (Slavoj Zizek, Giorgio Agamben, to cite the flavours ofthe month) or promoting 'grand revisionist conclusions about medieval culture'?he is a veteran ofthe New iiio Reviews Philology conflict?but by restoring the codicological dimension to medieval studies and thereby making us think carefully about what we understand by 'a/the text'. Should not every medievalist have had a go at editing a text? Busby is not quite so brutal as this, but the idea would certainly meet with his approval. The author of this study comes before us...
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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 | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.011 | 0.004 |
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".