Obsolescence and abortive innovations in variationist approaches to language change
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 The focus of most variationist studies of linguistic change to date has been the emergence and increase of new forms. The opposing process—obsolescence, or the decline and loss of older variants—is less well understood. Addressing several calls for more attention to be paid to obsolescence and its properties, this article surveys case studies mostly from English and French and suggests generalisations. Obsolescence, for many reasons, is a very long process. While the linguistic factors influencing an obsolescent form often become unpredictable, the social meaning and/or pragmatic effects associated with it may strengthen rather than weaken. A special subset of obsolescent forms are abortive innovations—those that begin by increasing, but then disappear suddenly. The notion that an abortive innovation is always a subcomponent of a two‐step innovation, otherwise successful, applies straightforwardly to several case studies identified in the variationist literature in recent years.
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 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 | 0.000 | 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