A question of change: Putting five complementary measures to the test with French polar interrogatives
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.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This paper explores how five key complementary features of variable systems—overall rates, variant conditioning, productivity, contextual dispersion, and diffusion in the community—must be marshaled to provide a more comprehensive characterization of change in progress. We illustrate by revisiting a robustly variable sector of Canadian French morphosyntax whose variants are known to be in flux: the polar interrogative domain. Analyses extend the timeline of Elsig (2009)/Elsig and Poplack’s (2006) diachronic analysis by an additional twenty-five years, bringing 2,000+ questions produced by 133 speakers to bear on developments occurring over a period of nearly a century and a half of spontaneous Québec French speech. Results underscore the need to consider more than rates and conditioning in the study of language change. Linguistic dispersion and diffusion in the community provide crucial insight into the mechanics of the transition period and contribute to identifying shifts in variant productivity at each point in time.
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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 | 0.001 | 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