A question of change: Putting five complementary measures to the test with French polar interrogatives
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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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 | 0.011 | 0.046 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.018 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.012 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".